Mark Zuckerberg Highlights Meta's $60 Billion Investment in AI Over the Past Year

 The CEO of Meta announced that the company plans to significantly increase its spending, including constructing a data center so massive it could cover a large portion of Manhattan.

Mark Zuckerberg on Sept. 25, 2024, in Menlo Park, Calif.

Jan. 24, 2025, 11:43 PM GMT+6

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed on Friday that the company plans to construct a massive data center in Louisiana to support its upcoming AI model, Llama 4, set for launch later this year.

In a Facebook post, Zuckerberg stated that Meta would invest over $60 billion into AI, which includes the new data center. He emphasized that the facility will be so large it could cover a substantial portion of Manhattan.

"This will be a defining year for AI. In 2025, I expect Meta AI to become the leading assistant for more than 1 billion people, Llama 4 to be the premier state-of-the-art model, and we’ll create an AI engineer that will contribute an increasing amount of code to our R&D efforts," Zuckerberg wrote. This project represents a significant increase in Meta’s capital spending, which was around $38 to $40 billion in 2024, according to Susan Li, Meta’s CFO. Despite these major expenditures, Zuckerberg assured that the company has the financial resources to continue investing in the future.

The announcement coincides with a broader surge in AI investments. Earlier this week, former President Donald Trump unveiled Project Stargate, an AI infrastructure joint venture with OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank. This initiative aims to establish a new company that could attract investments of up to $500 billion over the next four years.

This venture has captured the attention of top tech figures, including SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who recently engaged in a public feud with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman after commenting on an X post about the project, suggesting they "don’t actually have the money."

AI technology continues to dominate the tech landscape, with rising interest in AI models from companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic. Nvidia, which produces the graphics processing units (GPUs) essential for training AI models, saw a significant rise in market capitalization in 2024, reaching around $3.6 trillion. In addition, Trump signed an executive order on Thursday aimed at advancing AI development in the U.S., with the goal of removing obstacles to AI innovation and ensuring AI systems remain free of ideological bias or engineered social agendas.

Zuckerberg’s Friday announcement highlighted that Meta AI is on track to become the leading assistant for over 1 billion users, and Llama 4 is set to be the top model in the field. With the addition of the new data center, Meta is expected to conclude the year with over 1.3 million GPUs. In January, Zuckerberg announced a deal to purchase 350,000 H100 graphics cards from Nvidia, valued at billions of dollars.