Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Friday that the company plans to build a massive data center in Louisiana to power its newest AI model, Llama 4, which is set to launch this year.
In a Facebook post, Zuckerberg said the company would invest more than $60 billion into AI including the data center, which he noted would be “so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan.”
“This will be a defining year for AI. In 2025, I expect Meta AI will be the leading assistant serving more than 1 billion people, Llama 4 will become the leading state of the art model, and we’ll build an AI engineer that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to our R&D efforts,” Zuckerberg wrote.
The project would mark a significant jump in Meta’s capital expenditures, which were around $38 billion to $40 billion in 2024, Susan Li, Meta’s chief financial officer, had previously said. In the Facebook post, Zuckerberg said despite these major expenditures, the company has “the capital to continue investing in the years ahead.”
The announcement comes alongside a broad surge in AI investment, with President Donald Trump announcing earlier this week the launch of Project Stargate — an AI infrastructure joint venture with OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank — which aims to form a new company that could include investments of up to $500 billion over the next four years.
That project has caught the eye of other top tech executives, including SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who found himself in a feud with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman after responding to an X post announcing the venture that “they don’t actually have the money.”
AI technology has been a hot topic for many tech companies, with the rising popularity of AI models from companies like OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic. Nvidia, a company that makes graphics processing units, or GPUs — specialized computer chips that are used to train AI models — had one of the highest market capitalizations in 2024 and is currently valued at around $3.6 trillion.
Trump also signed an executive order Thursday that aims to further the development of AI technology in the U.S., with a stated goal of removing policies that act as “barriers to American AI innovation” and developing “AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas.”
In Friday’s announcement, Zuckerberg said he expects that “Meta AI will be the leading assistant serving more than 1 billion people” and that “Llama 4 will become the leading state of the art model.”
With the addition of the data center, he said, the company is set to end the year with more than 1.3 million GPUs. Last January, Zuckerberg said Meta would be purchasing 350,000 H100 graphics cards from Nvidia, a deal worth billions of dollars.
Zuckerberg had mentioned the data center project last month in an Instagram Reel announcing the release of Meta’s Llama 3.3 model, noting that the center would be used to build “future versions of Llama.” The project will be built in Richland Parish, a rural area in northeast Louisiana with a population of roughly 19,000 people, according to census data.
