Published on 25/01/2025
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, announced plans to boost capital spending to $60-$65 billion this year, nearly doubling 2024’s $38-$40 billion estimate.
The investment enhances Meta’s aggressive push into artificial intelligence, signaling its commitment to leading the next wave of tech innovation.
Meta’s stock price rose 1.7% Friday to close at an all-time high of $647.49 following the announcement, topping a record set just a day earlier. The shares have gained close to 65% over the past 12 months.
Zuckerberg said 2025 “will be a defining year for AI,” in a Facebook post on Friday, outlining Meta’s intentions to build an AI data center “so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan.”
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Meta expects the data center to bring online 1 gigawatt of computing power in 2025, and to end the year with more than 1.3 million GPU chips.
The CEO’s announcement comes just days after that of Stargate, the $500 billion AI project President Donald Trump announced Tuesday, which drove several related AI and nuclear energy stocks higher.
Zuckerberg also said he expects Meta AI to serve more than 1 billion people, powered by its Llama 4 large language model. In October, Zuckerberg said Llama 4 was “well into its development,” with smaller models set for launch sometime early this year.
Analysts at JPMorgan told clients Friday they believe Meta AI functionality will ramp up with Llama 4 this year, with some features similar to OpenAI’s Operator AI agent released Thursday.
