**Meta’s AI Ambitions: Building the Infrastructure of the Future**
As the tech giant behind Facebook and Instagram, Meta has been making some big moves in the AI space lately. Just last year, the company announced plans to spend big on building out its AI capabilities, citing the need for “major AI infrastructure” to develop the best AI models and product experiences.
Now, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced the launch of Meta Compute, a new initiative designed to bolster the company’s AI infrastructure. In a recent post on Threads, Zuckerberg outlined the company’s plans to build tens of gigawatts of energy infrastructure over the next decade, with the potential to scale to hundreds of gigawatts over time.
But what does that even mean? To put it in perspective, a gigawatt is a measurement of electrical energy equal to a billion watts. That’s a lot of energy! According to some estimates, America’s energy consumption could spike exponentially over the next decade, from 5 GW to 50 GW.
So, who’s leading this charge? Luckily, Zuckerberg has assembled a team of top-notch executives to spearhead the new challenge. Santosh Janardhan, the company’s head of global infrastructure, will lead work on technical structure, software stack, silicon program, developer productivity, and building and operating the company’s global datacenter fleet and network.
Next up is Daniel Gross, co-founder of Safe Superintelligence, who will lead a new group inside Meta responsible for long-term capacity strategy, supplier partnerships, industry analysis, planning, and business modeling. And finally, there’s Dina Powell McCormick, a former government official who recently joined Meta as the company’s president and vice chairman, who will work with governments to help build, deploy, invest in, and finance Meta’s infrastructure.
It’s clear that there’s a race to build out genAI-ready cloud environments, and Capex projections announced last year confirmed that most of Meta’s friends have similar ambitions. Microsoft has been busy partnering with AI infrastructure providers wherever it can, while Google parent company Alphabet recently acquired data center company Intersect.
I reached out to Meta for more details on the new initiative, but for now, it’s clear that Meta is serious about building out its AI capabilities and is willing to invest big to get there.
What do you think about Meta’s new AI ambitions? Let me know in the comments!
