Meta is moving forward with its plans to heavily invest in artificial intelligence infrastructure, following through on capital expenditure projections announced last year. During earnings call in 2025, Meta CFO Susan Li said the company viewed advanced AI infrastructure as a long-term competitive advantage in building leading AI models and products.
On Monday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Meta Compute, a new initiative aimed at significantly expanding the company’s AI infrastructure and energy capacity. Zuckerberg said Meta plans to dramatically grow its power usage over the coming years to support its AI operations.
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“Meta is planning to build tens of gigawatts this decade, and hundreds of gigawatts or more over time,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Threads. He added that how the company engineers, invests in, and partners to build this infrastructure will become a key strategic advantage.
A gigawatt represents one billion watts of power, and the growing energy demands of AI could sharply increase electricity consumption in the U.S. over the next decade. Some estimates suggest AI-related demand could rise from 5 gigawatts today to as much as 50 gigawatts.
Zuckerberg also announced the leadership team for the Meta Compute initiative. Santosh Janardhan, Meta’s head of global infrastructure and a longtime company executive, will oversee technical architecture, software systems, silicon development, developer productivity, and the operation of Meta’s global data center and network footprint.
Daniel Gross, who joined Meta last year and is the co-founder of Safe Superintelligence alongside former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, will lead a new group focused on long-term capacity strategy, supplier partnerships, industry analysis, and business modeling.
Additionally, Dina Powell McCormick, Meta’s president and vice chairman and a former government official, will work with governments to help build, deploy, invest in, and finance Meta’s expanding infrastructure efforts.
Meta’s announcement comes amid an industry-wide race to build AI-ready cloud environments. Other tech giants are making similar moves, with Microsoft expanding partnerships across the AI infrastructure ecosystem and Google parent Alphabet acquiring data center company Intersect late last year. Meta has not yet shared further details about the scope or timeline of the Meta Compute initiative.
