By Jaspreet Singh and Aditya Soni

(Reuters) -Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday that Meta Platforms would spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build several massive AI data centers for superintelligence, intensifying his pursuit of a technology he has chased with a talent war for top engineers.

The social media giant is among the large tech companies that have struck high-profile deals and doled out multi-million-dollar pay packages in recent months to fast-track work on machines that could outthink humans on many tasks.

Its first multi-gigawatt data center, dubbed Prometheus, is expected to come online in 2026, while another, called Hyperion, will be able to scale up to 5 gigawatts over the coming years, Zuckerberg said in a post on his Threads social media platform.

"We're building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan," the billionaire CEO said.

He also pointed to a report from industry publication SemiAnalysis that Meta was on track to be the first AI lab to bring a gigawatt-plus supercluster online.

Zuckerberg touted the strength in the company's core advertising business to justify the massive spending amid investor concerns on whether the expenditure would pay off.

"We have the capital from our business to do this," he said.

Meta shares were trading 1% higher. The stock has risen more than 20% so far this year.

The company, which generated nearly $165 billion in revenue last year, reorganized its AI efforts last month under a division called Superintelligence Labs after setbacks for its open-source Llama 4 model and key staff departures.

It is betting that the division would generate new cash flows from the Meta AI app, image-to-video ad tools and smart glasses.

Top members of the unit have considered abandoning Behemoth, the company's most powerful open-source AI model, in favor of developing a closed alternative, the New York Times reported separately on Monday.

D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria said Meta was investing aggressively in AI as the technology has already boosted its ad business by allowing it to sell more ads and at higher prices.

"But at this scale, the investment is more oriented to the long-term competition to have the leading AI model, which could take time to materialize," Luria said.

In recent weeks, Zuckerberg has personally led an aggressive talent raid for the Meta Superintelligence Labs, which will be led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and ex-GitHub chief Nat Friedman, after Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale.