When Meta announced capital expenditure projections last year, the company made it known that it planned to spend big to build out capacity for its AI business. “We expect that developing leading AI infrastructure will be a core advantage in developing the best AI models and product experiences,” said Susan Li, Meta CFO, during an earnings call last summer.
Now, the tech giant appears to be making good on that promise. On Monday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of Meta Compute, a new initiative designed to bolster the tech giant’s AI infrastructure. Zuckerberg said the company intended to drastically expand its energy footprint in the coming years.
“Meta is planning to build tens of gigawatts this decade, and hundreds of gigawatts or more over time. How we engineer, invest, and partner to build this infrastructure will become a strategic advantage,” Zuckerberg said, in a post on Threads.
For reference, a gigawatt is a measurement of electrical power equivalent to a billion watts. The energy-hungry AI business means that America’s electrical consumption could spike exponentially over the next decade (from 5 GW to 50, according to one estimate).
Zuckerberg has named three executives that he says will be spearheading the new project. One of those people is Santosh Janardhan, the company’s head of global infrastructure. Janardhan, who has been with the company since 2009, will lead work on “technical architecture, software stack, silicon program, developer productivity, and building and operating our global datacenter fleet and network,” Zuckerberg said.
Also involved is Daniel Gross, who joined the company just last year. Gross is the co-founder of Safe Superintelligence, along with former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. Zuckerberg said that Gross would be leading a new group within Meta that is “responsible for long-term capacity strategy, supplier partnerships, industry analysis, planning, and business modeling.”
Finally, Zuckerberg said that Dina Powell McCormick, a former government official who recently joined Meta as the company’s president and vice chairman, would be responsible for working with governments to help “build, deploy, invest in, and finance Meta’s infrastructure.”
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There’s obviously a race to build out genAI-ready cloud environments, and Capex projections announced last year showed most of Meta’s peers had similar ambitions. Microsoft has been busy partnering with AI infrastructure providers wherever it can and, in December, Google parent company Alphabet announced the acquisition of data center firm Intersect. TechCrunch reached out to Meta for more information about the new initiative.
