Meta To Spend Up To $65 Billion This Year To Power AI Goals (reuters.com) 31
Meta plans to spend between $60 billion and $65 billion this year to build out AI infrastructure, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday, joining a wave of Big Tech firms unveiling hefty investments to capitalize on the technology. From a report: As part of the investment, Meta will build a more than 2-gigawatt data center that would be large enough to cover a significant part of Manhattan. The company -- one of the largest customers of Nvidia's coveted artificial intelligence chips -- plans to end the year with more than 1.3 million graphics processors.
"This will be a defining year for AI," Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. "This is a massive effort, and over the coming years it will drive our core products and business." Zuckerberg expects Meta's AI assistant -- available across its services, including Facebook and Instagram -- to serve more than 1 billion people in 2025, while its open-source Llama 4 would become the "leading state-of-the-art model."
"This will be a defining year for AI," Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. "This is a massive effort, and over the coming years it will drive our core products and business." Zuckerberg expects Meta's AI assistant -- available across its services, including Facebook and Instagram -- to serve more than 1 billion people in 2025, while its open-source Llama 4 would become the "leading state-of-the-art model."
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What if you measure productivity as market cap / costs? How much cost can Meta finance through the stock market alone?
Joke wanted here (Score:1)
That sure wasn't funny.
Re:Pretty crazy (Score:4, Insightful)
"and the Chinese are achieving equivalent or better results with much, much less money and power requirements" - so says the CCP propaganda machine. Santa and Peter Rabbit want a word with you.
The ensh@#$%tion occurred long before 'AI' (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook use to just be a feed where you could see posts from friends and family in reverse chronological order.
Now it's just a chaotic mix of real posts mixed in with ads and videos from influencers on topics you couldn't give a brass razoo about.
So I am supposed to give a darn about super powered AI with ever subtler 'suggested posts'?
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Clearly you haven't been on Facebook in a while or you'd know it was overrun by AI generated trash these days. I pine for the days of influencers having topics I couldn't give a brass razoo about. At least the irrelevant content had 10 fingers and 10 toes.
Time to change their company name? (Score:5, Interesting)
Will Meta change their company name now that they've realised the metaverse is a dead end and "AI" is the new big, shiny buzzword and money maker?
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Brought to you by Metastabook.
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Probably more like:
Meta Intelligence.
Is this really what we want? (Score:2)
Do we really want to take vast amounts of our electricity, which we will eventually pay for in the form of higher power bills and higher inflation to cover the competition for that electricity, and use it for this?
I mean I
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Do we really want to spend vast amounts of money and electricity on what are mostly just automated office drones. I get why guys like Zuckerberg want them because for a long time they have been dependent on employees for their wealth and that's got to rankle them but what about us? Do we really want to take vast amounts of our electricity, which we will eventually pay for in the form of higher power bills and higher inflation to cover the competition for that electricity, and use it for this? I mean I know we don't have a lot of options for the next 4 years. But I do think we're going to get at least one more opportunity to make a decision. And I think we need to start asking if we would really want to keep living in a dog eat dog world. The only problem is everybody thinks they're going to be the dog eating. Nobody thinks they're going to get eaten until it happens and when it does, well it's game over.
What choice to any of us have? It's not even like election results would change this that much. The AI boom is coming, whether it does any of us any good or not, because the people with the money *WANT* the AI boom to happen. Even if it's a dead-end for the entire species, or just a dead-end for the people who toss unlimited resources at it, it's full steam ahead because they see the ultimate fantasy they've had since the beginning of time nearly within their grasp: a world where wealth can be accumulated w
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Do we really want to spend vast amounts of money and electricity
"We" aren't spending the money.
Meta is.
If you think they're making a mistake, you can short their stock.
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What if we actually overproduce energy, as the charts on the Energy Facts page at eia.gov will quickly show you, and the only reason your rates go up is because retail rates have been politically decoupled so that public commissions packed with private utility ex-employees and subject to corporate lobbying set the rates? Do you see how selling you a scarcity of electricity story, all the while knowing from the actual figures that most electricity generated is sent to ground because there isn't enough demand
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If you go to https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/co... [llnl.gov] and look up US total energy and Wa state energy production and consumption, will you too see that two-thrids of electricity generated is "rejected" or effectively sent to ground? If you blame coal-fired plants for ramping up when there is demand then not being turned off fast enough, how come Washington state, which produces so much hydroelectric it exports it, has a similar two-thirds electricity rejected figure? Aren't hydroelectric motors more than 30% effic
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In terms of size... (Score:1)
>As part of the investment, Meta will build a more than 2-gigawatt data center that would be large enough to cover a significant part of Manhattan
The article doesn't say, but Zuckerberg's post has a picture of the footprint of the proposed datacenter: it appears to take up about 1/3 of Manhattan's area.
The largest data center in the world from some googling currently appears to be around 1M m^2, 100a or 247 acres, which is under 2% of Manhattan's area.
This new datacenter would beat the largest recordhold
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What if the real goal of AI was to make you butthurt?
Oops (Score:2)
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What if companies these days make more from the stock market returns of hyping themselves than they need from actual paying retail customers?
In other words, if the rich get their money from finance not from the real economy which is tiny compared to financial market volumes, what power does your measly purchase decision have over them, anymore?
And I still won't use their garbage. (Score:2)
They could spend $65 trillion and I still won't give them one second of my eye time. Fuck Meta, Fuck Zuckerberg.
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Anyone else thinking of the Black Mirror episode where you have to pay to skip ads and they make sure you pay attention during the ads if you don't have enough credits to pay?
This should be mandatory (Score:2)
For any and all high power consumption industries.
AI and all Crypto mining come to mind here.
Both AI datacenters and the Crypto Bros should be required to fund the building
of some sort of power generation setup to offset the ludicrous amounts of power
these industries are consuming.
Holy. Fsck. (Score:2)