Mark Zuckerberg says Meta plans to spend over $60 billion as Silicon Valley panics over Chinese AI competition

• Mark Zuckerberg says Meta plans to spend another $60 billion in 2025 as it doubles down on AI.

• Zuckerberg said the company’s data center in Louisiana will be near the size of Manhattan.

• Silicon Valley is nervous after DeepSeek, a Chinese newcomer, recently revealed its new AI model.

Mark Zuckerberg warned investors in October that Meta planned to spend more than ever as the company leaned into the AI race.

Now, they know just how much.

Zuckerberg said in a Friday social media post that 2025 will be a “defining year for AI” and announced plans for $60 billion to $65 billion in additional capital investment for the year.

In a post on Threads, Zuckerberg also touted the company’s plans for its 2 GW data center in Louisiana, which he said would be “so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan.”

He also predicted that Meta AI would become “the leading assistant,” serving over 1 billion users.

“We’ll bring online ~1GW of compute in ’25 and we’ll end the year with more than 1.3 million GPUs,” he said. “We’re planning to invest $60-65B in capex this year while also growing our AI teams significantly, and we have the capital to continue investing in the years ahead.”

Meta’s stock dipped Friday morning after Zuckerberg’s announcement, but it quickly recovered.

In its Q3 earnings call, Meta said it anticipated “significant capital expenditures growth in 2025” as Zuckerberg explained that he’s happy to keep up heavy spending on AI.

AI had “a positive impact on nearly all aspects of our work,” he said at the time, noting that he saw “a lot of new opportunities to use new AI advances to accelerate our core business.”

Zuckerberg’s announcement came as Silicon Valley processes news that DeepSeek, a Chinese company, has developed an open-source AI model that outperformed some Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic models in third-party benchmarks.

AI and China was a major topic of conversation at this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“We should take the developments out of China very, very seriously,” said Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, which is OpenAI’s largest investor.

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