Meta Platforms has announced plans to invest up to $65 billion, around ₹5,61,908 crore, in artificial intelligence initiatives by 2025 to build a massive new data center and expand hiring in AI teams. The ambitious strategy was announced by Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg on Friday.
In a post to Facebook, he said the data center would be “so large that it would cover a significant part of Manhattan.” The company is aiming to bring a gigawatt of computing power online by 2025 and is on track to close out the year with more than 1.3 million graphics processing units.
This is a major undertaking that will deliver our core products and business, unlock historic innovation, and extend American technology leadership,” said Mr. Zuckerberg.
Over the past couple of years, Meta has shown its commitment to AI, recently announcing a new $10 billion data center in Louisiana, worth about ₹86,440 crore. The company is also investing in advanced computer chips for better products including its AI assistant and Ray-Ban smart glasses. “AI teams will increase significantly throughout 2025,” Zuckerberg added.
This announcement comes after a recent joint venture involving OpenAI, SoftBank Group Corp., and Oracle Corp. announced a plan to invest $100 billion or about ₹8,64,404 crore in data centres and AI infrastructure across the United States.
Meta’s projected spending for 2025 is about a 50% boost from its projected expenditure for 2024 and a more than double from 2023. The preliminary figure for the year 2024 is still to be unveiled along with its fourth-quarter earnings on Jan. 29.
Though Zuckerberg said in an earlier conversation that he suspected the company was overspending on A.I., he views the risk of losing a few billion dollars as preferable to falling behind in what may be a transformative era in computing.
“There’s a meaningful chance that a lot of companies are overbuilding now, and in retrospect, it’s going to look like we’ve overinvested by billions and billions of dollars,” he said. “But to me, that’s a rational investment to make because the value of being late in the right technology is extremely high.
Analysts on Wall Street had estimated that Meta would spend roughly $51.3 billion-about ₹4,43,444 crore-on capital expenditures in 2025. Shares of Meta fell in premarket trading but rose as much as 1.7% after markets opened while Broadcom Inc. shares rose up to 3.9% as the company is a significant chip design vendor for Meta.
Bloomberg Intelligence’s Senior Credit Analyst Robert Schiffman said that this significant capital expenditure increase by Meta could be a strategic move to lay the path for future growth and cement its lead in AI capabilities.
What’s more, it’s an unusual move by Zuckerberg to pre-announce Meta’s spending plans on Facebook ahead of the quarterly earnings announcement. Usually, companies pre-release such projections along with financial results or via formal regulatory channels.
