• by Colin Kirkland , Yesterday

On Friday in a post on Threads, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced “Meta Compute,” a new “top-level initiative” that maps out the tech giant’s decade-long plan to develop a global artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. 

“Meta is planning to build tens of gigawatts this decade, and hundreds of gigawatts or more over time,” the post reads, adding that engineering, investing and partnering efforts could play a strategic advantage in the burgeoning AI race. 

Meta Compute will be led by Santosh Janardhan -- the former Google executive and current head of global infrastructure and engineering at Meta -- and Daniel Gross, the former CEO and co-founder of AI-focused startup Safe Superintelligence. 

Just hours after Meta released a statement announcing former financier and Trump security advisor Dina Powell McCormick as the new company president, Zuckerberg notes that both Janardhan and Gross will work closely with Powell McCormick “to work on partnering with governments and sovereigns to build, deploy, invest in, and finance Meta’s infrastructure.”

In November, Meta committed to spending over $600 billion on AI development in the U.S. alone throughout 2028, focusing most of the money on building data centers intended to power the company’s pursuit of what it calls “superintelligence.”

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 also 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’s announcements have justified 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 has planned to bring 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 has also promised to restore water to watersheds in areas where its data centers run, with a plan to be “water positive by 2030.”

While Powell McCormick has been tasked with scaling Meta’s AI business, the new president and vice chair, according to Meta’s announcement, is also in charge of ensuring the company’s data centers don’t inflict environmental harms upon surrounding areas and communities. 

However, looking forward, 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.