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Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta.
Mark Zuckerberg announced a huge leap in Meta’s capital spending this year to between 65 billion, an increase driven by AI and a massive new data center.
The 70% increase over 2024 capital expenditure projections comes days after OpenAI and partners unveiled a $500 billion spending plan backed by President Trump called Stargate earlier this week.
“This will be a defining year for AI,” Zuckerberg said in a post on Facebook. “This is a massive effort, and over the coming years it will drive our core products and business, unlock historic innovation, and extend American technology leadership. Let’s go build!”
The spending plan is a roughly $14 billion jump from 2025 analyst projections, according to FactSet. Meta has been ramping up spending on AI over the past few years.
The company hasn’t released the 2024 capital expenditure number yet, but analysts expect it will come in around $38 billion, already a 40% jump from 2023.
In 2024, Meta broke ground on six new data centers. This year, the company plans to bring one gigawatt of computing power online and build a data center that is “so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan.” Meta expects to end the year with more than 1.3 million graphic processing units, commonly known as GPUs, Zuckerberg said.
Tech companies including Microsoft and Google have added tens of billions of dollars in spending in recent years as they seek to invest in server farms that can be used to train AI models. The Stargate announcement appears to have accelerated that race.
Elon Musk said he built a data center in just a few months in Memphis, Tenn., last year, and plans to increase its computing capacity to 1 million GPUs.
Since the rise of generative AI, investors have welcomed the spending spree but at times have questioned the path to profitability for many companies. Microsoft has sought to bundle AI products with its flagship business software, and Google has also sought to integrate its Gemini AI into its core products, with mixed results.
Write to Meghan Bobrowsky at meghan.bobrowsky@wsj.com