Mark Zuckerberg says Meta is launching its own AI infrastructure initiative

When Meta announced capital expenditure projections last year, the company made it known that it plans to spend big to build capacity for AI business. “We expect that developing a superior AI infrastructure will be a key advantage in developing the best AI models and product experiences,” said Susan Li, Meta’s CFO, during last summer’s earnings call.

Now, the tech giant seems to be making good on that promise. On Monday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg declare the launch of Meta Compute, a new initiative designed to power the tech giant’s AI infrastructure. Zuckerberg said the company plans to drastically expand its energy footprint in the coming years.

“We plan to build tens of gigawatts this decade, and hundreds of gigawatts or more over time. How we engineer, invest, and partner to build this infrastructure will be a strategic advantage,” said Zuckerberg, in a post on Threads.

For reference, a gigawatt is a measure of electrical power equal to a billion watts. Energy-hungry AI business means America’s electricity consumption could rise exponentially over the next decade (from 5 GW to 50according to one estimate).

Zuckerberg has named three executives who will lead the new project. One of them is Santosh Janardhan, the company’s head of global infrastructure. Janardhan, who has has been with the company since 2009will lead work on “technical architecture, software stack, silicon programming, developer productivity, and building and operating a fleet of global data centers and networks,” Zuckerberg said.

Also involved is Daniel Gross, who joined the company just last year. It’s gross co-founder of Aman Superintelligencealong with former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. Zuckerberg said Gross will lead a new group at Meta that is “responsible for long-term capacity strategy, supplier partnerships, industry analysis, planning, and business models.”

Finally, Zuckerberg said that Dina Powell McCormick, a former government official who recently joined Meta as president and vice chairman of the company, will be responsible for working with the government to help “build, deploy, invest in, and finance Meta’s infrastructure.”

There is obviously a race to build a genAI-ready cloud environment, and Capex Projection announced last year shows most of Meta’s friends have similar ambitions. Microsoft has been busy partnerships with AI infrastructure providers wherever possible and, in December, Google’s parent company Alphabet announced the acquisition data center company Intersect. TechCrunch reached out to Meta for more information on the new initiative.