Meta Is Planning a Data Center That Is So Large It Would Cover Half Of Manhattan

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the tech company will increase capital spending as much as $65 billion and build a data center that would occupy a large slice of Manhattan as it gears up for the future of artificial intelligence.

"This will be a defining year for AI," Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook Friday.

He said Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp, will build an AI engineer that will contribute code to the company's R&D efforts.

"To power this, Meta is building a 2GW+ data center that is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan. We'll bring online ~1GW of compute in '25 and we'll end the year with more than 1.3 million GPUs," he said, referring to graphics processing units used to process graphics, video and other visual info.

He also said Meta would hike capital expenditures to between $60 billion and $65 billion from the $40 billion it spent last year.

"This is a massive effort, and over the coming years it will drive our core products and business, unlock historic innovation, and extend American technology leadership," Zuckerberg said, adding: "Let's go build!"

Last month, Meta announced that it was building a $10 billion AI data center in Richland Paris, Louisiana.

The 4 million square feet facility will employ more than 500 people.