Mark Zuckerberg says Meta is launching its own AI infrastructure initiative

When he was declared dead Capital expenditure forecasts Last year, the company announced that it planned to spend significant sums to build the capabilities needed for its AI business. “We expect the development of leading AI infrastructure to be a key feature in developing best-in-class AI models and product experiences,” Meta CFO Susan Lee said during an earnings call last summer.

Now, it looks like the tech giant is making good on that promise. On Monday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg Announce Launching Meta Compute, a new initiative designed to enhance the tech giant’s AI infrastructure. Zuckerberg said the company intends to significantly expand its energy footprint in the coming years.

“Meta plans to build tens of gigawatts this decade, and hundreds of gigawatts or more over time. How we engineer, invest, and partner to build this infrastructure will become a strategic advantage,” Zuckerberg said in a post on Threads.

For reference, a gigawatt is a measurement of electrical energy equivalent to one billion watts. Energy-hungry AI work means America’s electricity consumption could skyrocket over the next decade (From 5 gigawatts to 50according to one estimate).

Zuckerberg has appointed three executives who he says will lead the new venture. One such person is Santosh Janardhan, the company’s global infrastructure head. Janardhan, who has I have been with the company since 2009Zuckerberg said he will lead work on “technical architecture, software stack, silicon, developer productivity, and building and operating our global data center fleet and network.”

Also participating is Daniel Gross, who joined the company just last year. Total is Co-Founder of Safe Superintelligencealong with former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. Zuckerberg said Gross will lead a new group within Meta “responsible for long-term capabilities strategy, supplier partnerships, industry analysis, planning, and business modeling.”

Finally, Zuckerberg said Dina Powell McCormick, a former government official Recently joined Meta As the company’s president and vice chairman, he will be responsible for working with governments to help “build, deploy, invest in and finance Meta’s infrastructure.”

There is clearly a race to build cloud environments ready for genetic AI, and Capital expenditure forecasts Its announcement last year showed that most of Meta’s peers have similar ambitions. Microsoft has been busy Partnering with AI infrastructure providers Where possible, in December, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced its acquisition of Data center company intersect. TechCrunch reached out to Meta for more information about the new initiative.