What just happened? Meta Platforms is embarking on an unprecedented expansion of its artificial intelligence infrastructure, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg announcing the construction of several enormous data centers designed to support the company's ambitions in advanced AI. The first of these, a facility dubbed Prometheus, is scheduled to come online in Ohio in 2026.
"We're calling the first one Prometheus and it's coming online in '26," Zuckerberg wrote on Threads, Meta's social media platform. "We're building multiple more titan clusters as well," he added, referencing additional planned complexes.
The scale of Meta's planned investment is staggering. Zuckerberg stated that the company will pour "hundreds of billions of dollars" into data center capacity to pursue what he calls "superintelligence" – AI systems that can match or surpass human capabilities at a wide range of tasks. "We have the capital from our business to do this," he wrote, underscoring Meta's financial strength, which is fueled primarily by advertising revenue from platforms like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.
Meta's data center buildout will include not only Prometheus in Ohio but also Hyperion, a $10 billion campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana. Hyperion is expected to eventually reach five gigawatts of capacity, making it one of the largest such facilities in the world. Zuckerberg described the new clusters as "multi-gigawatt," with just one covering a footprint comparable to a significant portion of Manhattan.
Meta expects to spend between $60 billion and $65 billion on AI data center projects in 2025, up from $35 billion to $40 billion the previous year. Analyst firm SemiAnalysis has reported that Meta is on track to be the first company to bring a supercluster with more than a gigawatt of capacity online, a milestone Zuckerberg cited in his announcement.
A key part of Meta's strategy is assembling a world-class team to drive its superintelligence efforts. Over the past year, Zuckerberg has personally recruited experts from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and other top AI organizations. These efforts have included offering compensation packages valued at up to $100 million over four years to lure talent from competitors.
Among the high-profile hires are Alexandr Wang, co-founder of Scale AI, who now serves as Meta's chief AI officer after the company acquired a 49 percent stake in his firm for $14.3 billion. Other notable additions include former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, co-founder of Safe Superintelligence. "For our superintelligence effort, I'm focused on building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry," Zuckerberg wrote.