When Meta announced its capital spending forecast last year, the company said it planned to spend heavily to build capacity for the artificial intelligence (AI) business segment.
We expect that the development of leading AI infrastructure will be a core advantage in developing AI models and the best product experience," Susan Li, Meta's Chief Financial Officer, said at a summer earnings report meeting last year.
Now, the technology giant is fulfilling that promise. On January 12, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of Meta Compute, a new initiative designed to strengthen the company's artificial intelligence infrastructure. Zuckerberg said that the company plans to significantly expand energy consumption in the coming years.
Meta is planning to build dozens of gigawatts in this decade, and hundreds of gigawatts or more in the future. The way we design, invest and cooperate to build this infrastructure will become a strategic advantage," Zuckerberg said in a post on Threads.
Gigawatt is a unit that measures electricity capacity equivalent to one billion watts. The artificial intelligence (AI) industry consumes a lot of energy, which means that US electricity consumption may skyrocket exponentially in the next decade, according to experts' estimates.
Zuckerberg has announced the names of three CEOs who will lead this new project. One of them is Santosh Janardhan, head of the company's global infrastructure division.
Janardhan, who has worked at the company since 2009, will lead the work on "engineering architecture, software systems, silicon programs, developer productivity, as well as building and operating our global data center network," Zuckerberg said.
Daniel Gross, who joined the company last year, is also involved in this project. Gross is the co-founder of Safe Superintelligence, along with former OpenAI science director Ilya Sutskever. Zuckerberg said Gross will lead a new group in Meta, responsible for "long-term capacity strategy, partnering with suppliers, industry analysis, planning and business models".
Finally, Zuckerberg said that Dina Powell McCormick, a former government official who just joined Meta as chairman and vice chairman of the company's board of directors, will be responsible for cooperating with governments to help "build, deploy, invest and finance Meta's infrastructure".
Clearly, there is a race to build a cloud environment ready for generative artificial intelligence, and investment cost forecasts released last year showed that most of Meta's competitors have similar ambitions.
Microsoft has actively cooperated with AI infrastructure providers whenever possible. Meanwhile, Google's parent company, Alphabet, announced the acquisition of data center company Intersect in December 2025.
