Mark Zuckerberg to spend 'hundreds of billions of dollars' for project he 'poached' AI engineers from Apple, Google, OpenAI and other tech companies

Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Facebook parent company

Meta

plans to invest “hundreds of billions of dollars” in constructing several massive

AI data centers

. This commitment comes at a time when Meta is intensifying its pursuit of superintelligence, a technology aimed at developing machines that can outperform humans on most tasks. Lately, the social media giant has been actively involved in a talent war, reportedly offering multi-million-dollar compensation packages to attract top AI engineers from competitors like Google, Apple and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.Zuckerberg announced this spending commitment in posts on Facebook and Threads, assuring investors that the company's strong core advertising business provides the necessary capital. “We have the capital from our business to do this,” he stated, addressing concerns among tech investors about the substantial outlay and its potential returns. He also referenced a Semianalysis report, which suggested Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring online a 1-gigawatt-plus supercluster, a term for a massive data center designed for training advanced AI models.Meta is developing multiple multi-gigawatt data center clusters to support its AI ambitions. The first, named Prometheus, is slated to come online in 2026. Another, Hyperion, is designed to scale up to 5 gigawatts in the coming years, with additional clusters also under development.

Read Mark Zuckerberg's full announcement

For our superintelligence effort, I'm focused on building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry. We're also going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence. We have the capital from our business to do this.SemiAnalysis just reported that Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online. 💪We're actually building several multi-GW clusters. We're calling the first one Prometheus and it's coming online in '26. We're also building Hyperion, which will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years. We're building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan.Meta Superintelligence Labs will have industry-leading levels of compute and by far the greatest compute per researcher. I'm looking forward to working with the top researchers to advance the frontier!