Mark Zuckerberg says Meta is launching its own AI infrastructure initiative

When Meta announced its capital spending forecasts last year, the company announced that it planned to spend a significant amount to build capacity 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.

And now it looks like the tech giant is making good on that promise. CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday announced the launch of Meta Compute, a new initiative designed to bolster 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. The energy-hungry AI business means America’s electricity consumption could rise dramatically over the next decade (from 5 gigawatts to 50 gigawatts, according 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 been with the company since 2009, will lead work on “technical architecture, software stack, silicon, developer productivity, and building and operating our global data center fleet and network,” Zuckerberg said.

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

Finally, Zuckerberg said that Dina Powell McCormick, a former government official who recently joined Meta as the company’s president and vice chairman of the board, will be responsible for working with governments to help “build, deploy, invest and finance Meta’s infrastructure.”

There’s clearly a race to build AI-ready generative cloud environments, and VC forecasts announced last year showed that most Meta peers have similar ambitions. Microsoft has been busy partnering with AI infrastructure providers wherever it can, and 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.