Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared fresh estimates for AI capital expenditure spending in a Facebook post just moments back. Meta, along with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, is among the handful of big technology companies with access to a foundational AI model that enables it to build products and services that can be used to monetize AI. According to Zuckerberg, Meta will invest as much as $65 billion through capital expenditure this year in order to build compute capacity that is capable of ensuring that its Llama 4 model becomes the "leading state of the art model."
Mark Zuckerberg Calls 2025 The "Defining Year For AI" As He Ups Meta's Capital Expenditure
Unlike Microsoft and Google, Meta's social media platforms have made it one of the more unique AI companies since they have allowed the firm to sell its AI services to advertisers and promote them in a sizable user base. Additionally, unlike OpenAI, Zuckerberg's decision to make his Llama foundational AI model open source has also won him developer appreciation and allowed the firm to easily fine tune the model.
In a fresh Facebook post made moments back, Zuckerberg significantly increased his firm's 2024 capital expenditure. Ahead of today's post, analysts had expected Meta to spend between $51 billion to $53 billion in capital expenditure this year. However, according to the Meta CEO, his firm will now spend between $60 billion and $65 billion in capital expenditure as part of its efforts to make Llama 4 "the leading state of the art model."
In comparison, Meta had spent $38 billion last year, so its latest announcement is more than 1.5x of its previous year's spending. Zuckerberg's latest announcement comes after President Trump's $500 billion Stargate project which has seen billions of dollars in commitments from OpenAI and Softbank.
Sharing additional details about Meta's latest spending initiative, Zuckerberg revealed that he intends to build "an AI engineer" to generate software code and contribute to his firm's research and development efforts. As part of its efforts to build this engineer, Meta will set up a massive 2-gigawatt data center, which is "so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan," according to Zuckerberg.
He added that roughly 1 gigawatt of this computing capacity will be online by the end of this year, and it will use more than a whopping 1.3 million GPUs. Zuckerberg believes that his latest announcement "is a massive effort" that will drive his firm's "core products and business, unlock historic innovation, and extend American technology leadership."
Zuckerberg's billions of dollars in capital expenditure make him join other large AI players who plan to continue to fork out billions of dollars in 2025 for AI spending. Among these is software giant Microsoft, which aims to spend $80 billion to provide its Azure cloud computing products powered by OpenAI's models all over the world. Elon Musk also plans to build massive data centers for his companies.
After opening the day roughly 1.4% lower, Meta's shares surged by 2% to break away from most big tech peers who lagged during early hours trading today. The firm's previous capital expenditure announcements have generated mixed reactions from investors who have weighed them against its ability to earn AI profits.
About the author: Ramish is a seasoned technology writer and editor with more than a decade of experience. He specializes in semiconductor fabrication and market analysis. With a background in finance and supply chain management - via his bachelors in Finance and a micromasters in supply chain management from MIT - Ramish combines financial rigor with deep industry insight to deliver accurate and authoritative coverage.
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.
