Mark Zuckerberg Says Meta Is Building A 5gw Ai Data Center

Meta is presently building retired a information center, called Hyperion, which nan institution expects to proviso its caller AI laboratory pinch 5 gigawatts (GW) of computational power, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said successful a Monday post connected Threads.

The announcement marks Meta’s latest move to get up of OpenAI and Google successful nan AI race. After antecedently poaching apical talent to tally Meta Superintelligence Lab, including former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and erstwhile Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross, Meta now seems to beryllium turning its attraction to nan monolithic computational powerfulness needed to train frontier AI models.

Zuckerberg said Hyperion’s footprint will beryllium ample capable to screen astir of Manhattan. He besides noted that Meta plans to bring a 1 GW ace cluster, called Prometheus, online successful 2026, making it 1 of nan first tech companies to do so.

Meta’s AI information halfway build-out seems apt to make nan institution much competitory pinch OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic successful its expertise to train and service starring AI models. It’s imaginable nan effort could besides thief Meta pull further talent, who whitethorn beryllium drawn to activity astatine a institution pinch nan computational needs to compete successful nan AI race.

Together, Prometheus and Hyperion will soak up capable power to powerfulness millions of homes, which could propulsion important amounts of energy and h2o from neighboring communities. One of Meta’s information halfway projects successful Newton County, Georgia, has already caused nan h2o taps to tally barren successful immoderate residents’ homes, The New York Times reported Monday.

Other AI information halfway projects whitethorn origin akin problems for group surviving adjacent them. AI hyperscaler CoreWeave is readying a information halfway description that is projected to double nan energy needs of a metropolis adjacent Dallas, Texas, according to Bloomberg.

Nevertheless, tech companies are wished to build retired monolithic datacenter projects to powerfulness their AI ambitions. Other notable efforts see OpenAI’s Stargate task pinch Oracle and Softbank, arsenic good arsenic xAI’s Colossus supercomputer.

The Trump management has mostly championed nan tech industry’s AI information halfway buildout. President Donald Trump helped OpenAI denote its Stargate project, and has since spoken astir efforts to grow America’s AI infrastructure.

In a file featured successful The Economist connected Monday, U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright called for nan U.S. to “lead nan adjacent awesome energy-intensive frontier: artificial intelligence.” He noted that AI transforms energy into nan “most valuable output imaginable: intelligence,” and that nan national authorities would accelerate nan accumulation of power derived from coal, nuclear, geothermal, and earthy gas.

With nan support of national officials, nan AI manufacture seems poised to soak up overmuch of America’s power successful nan years to come. Experts estimate that data centers could relationship for 20% of America’s power consumption by 2030, up from conscionable 2.5% successful 2022. Without quickly accrued power production, that could origin moreover much problems for communities.