Facebook owner investing up to $65 billion toward AI in 2025
Facebook and Instagram owner Meta Platforms is planning to spend as much as $65 billion this year alone to build on the social media company's artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Friday.
In a post on Facebook, Zuckerberg declared 2025 "will be a defining year for AI," saying he expects the company's "Meta AI will be the leading assistant serving more than 1 billion people, Llama 4 will become the leading state of the art model, and we'll build an AI engineer that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to our R&D efforts."
The founder said Meta is building a massive data center to power it all, with plans to invest between $60 billion and $65 billion in 2025, adding, "and we have the capital to continue investing in the years ahead."
Meta's latest move aims to bolster the company's position against rivals OpenAI and Google in the race to dominate AI.
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Big Tech firms have been investing tens of billions of dollars to develop AI infrastructure after the success of OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Meta's announcement comes just days after President Donald Trump announced that OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle will form a venture called Stargate and invest $500 billion in AI infrastructure across the U.S.
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Earlier this month, Microsoft said it was planning to invest about $80 billion in fiscal 2025 to develop data centers, while Amazon.com has said its 2025 spending would be higher than an estimated $75 billion in 2024.
Meta has emerged as a significant player in the AI race with its AI chatbot, Ray-Ban smart glasses and open-source approach, which sets it apart from rivals by allowing consumers and most businesses to use its Llama AI models for free.
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The $60 billion to $65 billion capital spending outlined for 2025 would mark a significant jump from the company's estimated expenditure of $38 billion to $40 billion for last year. It is also above analysts' estimate of $50.25 billion in 2025, according to LSEG data.
Reuters contributed to this report.