Zuckerberg: Announcement of huge AI data centers

Data centers that could fill the core of Manhattan – with this vision, the Facebook group Meta wants to take the lead in artificial intelligence.

“Hundreds of billions of dollars” will be invested for this, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the online platform Threads. Meta has previously estimated investments of more than 70 billion dollars for this year.

He announced that the first new plant, called Prometheus, would be connected to the grid in 2026. Another one called Hyperion will consume up to 5 gigawatts of energy in the final expansion stage in a few years’ time. Experts estimate that the energy required for this could supply more than four million average US households with electricity for a year.

According to media reports, Zuckerberg is dissatisfied with the pace at which Meta is progressing with the development of powerful artificial intelligence. In recent weeks, the company has spent a lot of money to attract top experts in the industry. These include a senior AI developer from Apple, whom Meta lured with a 200 million dollar remuneration package, according to the financial service Bloomberg. Zuckerberg also hired 28-year-old Alexandr Wang as head of AI – a co-founder of the company Scale AI, in which Meta also acquired a 49% stake for 14.3 billion dollars.

Is a change of strategy coming?

Meta wants to compete at the forefront of artificial intelligence with chatGPT developer OpenAI, among others. But Elon Musk’s AI company xAI also wants to spend billions of dollars on data centers. xAI is developing the AI chatbot Grok, which recently caused a scandal with anti-Semitic remarks. Following the fierce criticism, xAI attributed this to a failed update and apologized.

According to the New York Times, Meta is considering abandoning the previous open-source approach, in which the software code behind it is disclosed, for its most powerful AI model to date, called Behemoth. This would be a U-turn, as Meta previously insisted that open-source AI programs would ultimately prevail over the competition.

dpa