Meta Platforms founder, Chairman, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg never does anything halfway, and the artificial-intelligence race is no different.
This year, Meta will spend about $70 billion on AI data centers, almost double last year’s total. There have also been numerous reports that Zuckerberg has been personally recruiting the top AI talent in the world with nine-figure offers to form a new “superintelligence” unit.
On Monday Zuckerberg posted to Threads, Meta’s competitor to X, to explain the accelerated spending. “I’m focused on building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry,” he said. “We’re also going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence.”
Meta had $91 billion in operational cash flows last year, and that sort of profitability is what funds this spending spree.
Superintelligence is a machine that can do any intellectual job at least as well as the best human, and this has become the holy grail of research. With Meta’s latest model, Llama 4, being poorly received, Zuckerberg decided to shake things up by trying to bring the best researchers to Meta, and putting the most computing power at their fingertips.
Everyone else in the superintelligence race such as Alphabet and OpenAI will have to adjust to a new world where top talent is much more expensive.