Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram) plans to invest up to $65 billion this year, a 50% increase over its 2024 investment, to significantly expand its AI team and bolster its competitive position in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector.
According to AFP, on January 24, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated on his personal Facebook page that 2025 will be a critical year for AI. He expects Meta AI to become the leading AI assistant, serving over 1 billion people, and Llama 4 will become a top advanced model. Meta will train AI engineers to support its research and development efforts, leading to more breakthroughs.
On January 25, Zuckerberg announced that Meta would increase capital spending to $60–65 billion this year, up from $38–40 billion in 2024. Most of this budget will be used to build and expand data centers, which are critical infrastructure for providing computational power for AI products on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
“In the coming years, this will drive our core products and lead to historic innovations, solidifying America’s technology leadership,” Zuckerberg shared on his personal Facebook page.
Meta also aims to own more than 1.3 million graphics processing units (GPUs) by the end of 2025. GPUs are considered a key component for the computational power required to develop AI systems.
As AI technology becomes more widespread, the supply of GPUs has become scarce, with major tech companies like Meta, Nvidia, and Google competing for control.
Zuckerberg’s figure is much higher than analysts’ predictions. According to Bloomberg estimates, investors had previously expected Meta’s capital expenditure to reach $51.3 billion by 2025.
Zuckerberg also revealed that to achieve this goal, Meta is building a data center with a capacity of over 2GW, large enough to cover a significant portion of Manhattan. He stated that Meta plans to bring 1GW of computational capacity online by 2025 and have more than 1.3 million GPUs by the end of this year.
Since OpenAI launched its generative AI model ChatGPT in late 2022, the rapid rise of generative AI has sparked intense competition among tech giants. Google and Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI, are competing to take the lead in the AI field.
These companies are committed to building the best AI assistants and are heavily investing in the necessary data centers to support their models. However, these new servers and advanced semiconductors are expensive and energy-intensive.
In 2024, many major tech companies faced market criticism for spending heavily on AI without seeing immediate returns on their investments. Nevertheless, these companies are determined to invest aggressively rather than fall behind in this groundbreaking technology.
On January 21, President Trump launched a new AI project called Stargate, in partnership with OpenAI, cloud computing company Oracle, and Japanese investment giant SoftBank. This project plans to invest up to $500 billion in AI infrastructure in the United States over the next four years.
Following this announcement, Elon Musk, the multi-talented entrepreneur and CEO of Tesla and AI-related companies, who has repeatedly criticized OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on the social media platform X, claimed that the joint venture “does not have enough capital.”
In response to Musk’s accusations, in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated that Microsoft has $80 billion. This is Microsoft’s investment in AI and cloud infrastructure.
Nadella noted that this amount would ensure Azure’s global capabilities continue to expand, including supporting OpenAI models. Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing service platform.
