Zuckerberg sets Meta’s AI targets for the year, expects to spend $60 billion on growth

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday announced the company plans to invest around $60 billion to $65 billion in capital expenditures in 2025 as it continues to build out its artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Zuckerberg said 2025 will be “a defining year for AI” and that Meta is building a large datacenter that “would cover a significant part of Manhattan” to power its AI offerings. Additionally, Meta will bring on around 1 gigawatt in compute and end the year with more than 1.3 million graphics processing units, he said.

“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 wrote in a post on Facebook.

Meta shares hit a new all-time high on Friday during intraday trading after the announcement.

The company has been pouring billions of dollars into AI and ramping up related research and development in recent years, but it’s a fiercely competitive market and will take time before investors begin to reap those benefits. In an April call with investors, Zuckerberg said he expects to see a “multiyear investment cycle” before Meta’s AI products will scale into profitable services, but he also noted that the company has a “strong track record” in that department.

Shares of Meta plunged 16% at the time. The company still generates the vast majority of its revenue from digital advertising.

Zuckerberg said Friday that he expects the company’s Meta AI digital assistant to become the “leading assistant serving more than 1 billion people.” Meta is also building an AI engineer that will contribute “increasing amounts of code to our R&D efforts,” Zuckerberg added.

“We have the capital to continue investing in the years ahead,” he wrote in his Facebook post.