Mark Zuckerberg says Meta will launch its own AI infrastructure initiative

When Meta released its capital expenditure forecast last year, the company revealed that it planned to invest significantly to increase its AI business capabilities. “We expect developing a cutting-edge AI infrastructure to be a core advantage in developing the best AI models and product experiences,” Meta CFO Susan Li said on an earnings call last summer.

Now, the tech giant appears to be delivering on that promise. On Monday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of Meta Computing, a new initiative designed to power the tech giant’s AI infrastructure. Zuckerberg said the company intends to significantly expand its energy usage over the next few years.

“Meta plans to build tens of gigawatts this decade, and hundreds of gigawatts or more over the long term. How we design, invest, and partner to build this infrastructure will be a strategic advantage,” Zuckerberg said in a Threads post.

For reference, a gigawatt is a unit of electricity equivalent to one billion watts. The energy-intensive AI business means that America’s electricity consumption could skyrocket exponentially over the next decade (from 5 GW to 50 GW, by some estimates).

Zuckerberg has named three executives who he says will spearhead the new project. One of them is Santosh Janardhan, the company’s global head of infrastructure. Janardhan, who has been with the company since 2009, will lead work on “technology architecture, software stacks, silicon programs, developer productivity, and building and operating our global data center fleet and network,” Zuckerberg said.

Daniel Gross, who joined the company just last year, is also involved. Gross is a co-founder of Safe Superintelligence with former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. Zuckerberg said Gross will lead a new group within Meta that will be “responsible for long-term capacity strategy, supplier partnerships, industry analysis, planning and business modeling.”

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

There is clearly a race to build generative AI-enabled cloud environments, and capital spending forecasts released last year indicate that most of Meta’s peers have similar ambitions. Microsoft is focused on partnering with AI infrastructure providers whenever possible, and in December, Google’s parent company Alphabet announced the acquisition of data center company Intersect. TechCrunch reached out to Meta for more information about the new initiative.