Meta Platforms has announced plans to invest up to $65 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure in 2025, a move aimed at strengthening its position in the competitive AI race alongside industry leaders such as OpenAI and Google. 

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, unveiled the plans on 24 January, emphasising Meta's ambition to accelerate its AI capabilities and expand its influence in the rapidly evolving technology sector.

In a recent Facebook post, Zuckerberg described the transformative potential of the initiative, stating, "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. To power this, Meta is building a 2GW+ datacenter that is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan.

"We'll bring online ~1GW of compute in '25 and we'll end the year with more than 1.3 million GPUs. We're planning to invest $60-65B in capex this year while also growing our AI teams significantly, and we have the capital to continue investing in the years ahead. This is a massive effort, and over the coming years it will drive our core products and business, unlock historic innovation, and extend American technology leadership," Zukerberg added.

The announcement follows significant investments by other major technology firms including Microsoft. Earlier this month, Microsoft revealed plans to allocate $80 billion on AI in fiscal 2025. Additionally, the announcement comes in the wake of the US President Donald Trump unveiling the $500 billion Stargate initiative, a collaboration between OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle to expand AI infrastructure across the United States.

Meta has also distinguished itself from competitors through its open-source approach, which allows researchers and businesses to access its Llama AI models free of charge. Meta also announced plans to make Llama available to US government agencies and contractors working on national security risks in November 2024.