Meta has embarked on a significant undertaking to bolster its artificial intelligence capabilities with the announcement of Meta Compute, a new initiative aimed at drastically expanding its AI infrastructure. This move follows the company's capital expenditure projections from last year, where CFO Susan Li emphasized that developing leading AI infrastructure would be a core advantage in creating superior AI models and product experiences.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed the Meta Compute project, outlining ambitious plans for the tech giant's energy footprint. He stated that Meta intends to build tens of gigawatts of capacity this decade, with projections reaching hundreds of gigawatts or more over time. Zuckerberg highlighted the strategic importance of how Meta engineers, invests in, and partners to build this extensive infrastructure, noting it will become a significant competitive advantage. To contextualize, a gigawatt is a massive unit of electrical power, equivalent to one billion watts, underscoring the scale of Meta's energy demands. The burgeoning AI industry's energy consumption is anticipated to cause a substantial increase in America's electrical usage over the next decade, with some estimates suggesting a spike from 5 gigawatts to 50.

Three key executives have been tasked with spearheading the Meta Compute initiative. Santosh Janardhan, Meta's head of global infrastructure and a long-standing employee since 2009, will oversee critical areas including technical architecture, the software stack, the silicon program, developer productivity, and the construction and operation of Meta's global datacenter fleet and network.

Daniel Gross, who joined Meta just last year and is notably the co-founder of Safe Superintelligence with former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, will lead a new group. This group will be responsible for long-term capacity strategy, fostering supplier partnerships, conducting industry analysis, planning, and business modeling for Meta Compute.

Rounding out the leadership team is Dina Powell McCormick, who recently joined Meta as the company’s president and vice chairman after a distinguished career as a government official. Her role will involve engaging with governments to facilitate the building, deployment, investment in, and financing of Meta's extensive infrastructure.

Meta's aggressive investment in AI infrastructure is set against a backdrop of intense competition among tech giants. The race to build generative AI-ready cloud environments is evident across the industry, with Meta's peers demonstrating similar ambitions in their capital expenditure projections. Microsoft, for instance, has been actively forming partnerships with various AI infrastructure providers, while Google parent company Alphabet acquired data center firm Intersect in December to enhance its capabilities.