Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, revealed on Friday that the company intends to construct a sizable data center in Louisiana to support Llama 4, its newest AI model, which is scheduled to debut this year.
Zuckerberg stated in a Facebook post that the business would invest over $60 billion in AI, including the construction of a data center that would be so big it would occupy a sizable portion of Manhattan.
AI will have a pivotal year this year. “We’ll build an AI engineer who will start contributing increasing amounts of code to our R&D efforts,” Zuckerberg said. “I expect Meta AI to be the leading assistant serving over 1 billion people in 2025, and Llama 4 to become the leading state of the art model.”
Susan Li, Meta’s chief financial officer, had previously stated that the project would represent a substantial increase in the company’s capital expenditures, which were approximately $38 billion to $40 billion in 2024. Despite these significant expenses, Zuckerberg stated in the Facebook post that the corporation has the funds to make further investments in the years to come.
President Donald Trump announced earlier this week the launch of Project Stargate, an AI infrastructure joint venture with OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank that aims to form a new company with investments of up to $500 billion over the next four years. This announcement coincides with a general surge in AI investment.
Other prominent tech leaders have taken notice of the endeavor, such as Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, who got into a dispute with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, after replying to an X post announcing the venture that they don’t actually have the funds.
With the growing popularity of AI models from firms like OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, AI technology has become a hot topic for many tech companies. With one of the largest market capitalizations in 2024, Nvidia, a manufacturer of graphics processing units, or GPUs, specialized computer chips required to train AI models, is currently valued at over $3.6 trillion.
Additionally, Trump issued an executive order Thursday that intends to advance AI technology in the United States. The order states that the goal is to remove policies that hinder American AI innovation and to develop AI systems free from social agendas or ideological bias.
Zuckerberg stated in his announcement on Friday that he anticipates Llama 4 to emerge as the top state-of-the-art model and Meta AI to become the most popular assistant, serving over 1 billion people.
According to him, the company will have more than 1.3 million GPUs by the end of the year with the addition of the data center. In a billion-dollar transaction announced last January, Zuckerberg announced that Meta will buy 350,000 H100 graphics cards from Nvidia.
In an Instagram post last month announcing the introduction of Meta’s Llama 3.3 model, Zuckerberg made reference to the data center project and stated that it would be utilized to construct Llama versions in the future. According to census data, the project will be constructed in Richland Parish, a rural region in northeast Louisiana that is home to about 19,000 people.