Meta Plans to Drop $65 Billion on AI This Year

Meta on Friday revealed plans to spend a whopping $60-65 billion in capital expenditure pursuing its AI ambitions this year.

“This will be a defining year for AI,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. “We’re planning to invest $60-65B in capex this year while also growing our AI teams significantly, and we have the capital to continue investing in the years ahead.”

A large chunk of Meta’s planned capital spending will go into a massive, 2GW+ AI data center. According to Zuckerberg, it will be large enough to cover much of Manhattan. With a planned 4 million sq. ft. footprint in Richland Parish, northeast Louisiana, the data center will be Meta’s largest to date. The structure will also mark the company’s 23rd data center in the U.S., and 27th globally.

“It will play a vital role in accelerating our AI progress,” Meta said about the planned data center when it was announced back in December. Zuckerberg noted that the company will bring about 1GW of the facility’s compute capacity online this year, ending 2025 with more than 1.3 million GPUs.

Meta also wants to build a nuclear-powered AI data center in the U.S., an initiative that recently hit a roadblock thanks to a rare bee species.

Zuckerberg added that he expects Meta AI to become the world’s leading AI assistant this year, surging to more than 1 billion users, and Llama 4 to become the most advanced AI model. Meta AI had 600 million active monthly users as of December. Llama enjoyed explosive growth over 2024, exceeding 650 million downloads and solidifying its place in the AI race.

Meta’s CEO also teased the rather ambitious goal of developing an AI engineer capable of coding so well that it will support the company’s R&D operations.

“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,” Zuckerberg concluded.