Mark Zuckerberg announced a huge leap in Meta Platforms’s capital spending this year to between $60 billion to $65 billion, an increase driven by artificial intelligence and a massive new data center.
The plan to increase the company’s capital expenditures by as much as roughly 70% over 2024 comes days after tech rivals including OpenAI unveiled a $500 billion spending plan backed by President Trump called Stargate.
“This will be a defining year for AI,” Zuckerberg said in a post on Facebook. “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. Let’s go build!” Meta operates a suite of AI products, including an open-source model that developers can build on top of and AI chatbots embedded in its apps. The company is also planning to build an AI engineer that will start writing its own code, Zuckerberg said Friday. The company’s shares rose by less than 1% in early trading.
The spending plan is a roughly $14 billion jump from 2025 analyst projections, according to FactSet. Meta has been ramping up spending on AI over the past few years. The company hasn’t released the 2024 capital expenditure number yet, but analysts expect it will come in around $38 billion, already a 40% jump from 2023.
In 2024, Meta broke ground on six new data centers. This year, the company plans to bring one gigawatt of computing power online and build out a data center in Louisiana that is “so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan.” Meta expects to end the year with more than 1.3 million graphic processing units, commonly known as GPUs, Zuckerberg said.
More on Meta’s spending on data centers and AI on WSJ
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