• by Colin Kirkland , 8 hours ago

With mounting competition, Meta is committed to spending over $600 billion in the U.S. in support of the development of its “superintelligence” goals, which covers three years of “AI technology, infrastructure and workforce expansion,” the tech giant wrote in a blog post Tuesday.

Most of the money Meta is planning to spend will go into the creation and operation of U.S. data centers -- a “crucial” ingredient to developing advanced AI technology, the company writes.

In its most recent performance report, the development of AI data centers, as well as partnerships integral to operation, caused Meta's infrastructure costs to skyrocket./p>

In addition to spending $14.3 billion in Q3 to acquire a 49% stake in Scale AI – a startup that operates a global workforce of contractors who label images, text and video for machine learning applications – Meta signed a $27 billion financing deal with Blue Owl Capital to pay for its multi-gigawatt datacenter Hyperion and $1.5 billion on a data center in El Paso, Texas.

Meta is justifying the hundreds of billions of dollars it will spend on data centers by highlighting their potential to drive economic growth, supporting jobs and businesses across the U.S. Over the past 15 years, Meta claims that its data center projects have supported over 30,000 skilled trade jobs and 5,000 operational jobs.

With its newly announced spending promise, Meta says that it is bringing over $20 billion in business to subcontractors as well, paying for the associated energy costs, updating grid infrastructure, creating 15 gigawatts of new energy added to power grids in the U.S., and building new roads and water systems.

Meta says it is restoring water to watersheds in areas where its data centers run, with a plan to be “water positive by 2030.”

<p">Considering these forward-looking statements, it is notable that the company's Louisiana-based Hyperion data center will eventually take the equivalent of electricity that powers up to 4 million homes over the course of a year, while another center outside of Atlanta depleted local people's water supply over the summer, skyrocketing municipal water costs, per a report from the New York Times.