Meta makes ground on AI

Meta is going all in on AI - maybe it is time for a name change? On a Thread post yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta plans to spend hundreds of billions on computing power to build superintelligence. The company's free cash flow last year was just over $90 billion, which means they plan to spend all of their free cash on AI and data centres. In my book, that is better than a pile of money building up on the balance sheet doing nothing. Our GDP is around $400 billion, and Meta will spend that on developing AI over the next five years.

Next year a 1GW data centre will come online called Prometheus, and will use 500 000 Nvidia chips. There is an even larger data centre being planned, called Hyperion, which is expected to produce 2GW of computing power by 2030 and then continue to ramp up to 5GW in the years following. To give you context of the size, that data centre will use more energy than Medupi produces and will be nearly the size of Manhattan Island. See the image below, I screen-grabbed it from Zuckerberg's video post.

These are transformational hardware investments from Meta, to go with the expensive super-team of AI researchers recently hired. The company is positioning itself to be an AI leader. Will the likes of Microsoft and Google follow with similar spending patterns?