(David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
In his pursuit to create “AI superintelligence,” Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg is teasing plans to build not one, but several energy-hungry data centers dedicated to AI training.
Back in January, Zuckerberg mentioned creating a data center so large it would cover large parts of Manhattan island if placed in New York City. On Monday, he indicated Facebook’s parent company Meta has been expanding on those plans by investing “hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence.”
The resulting data centers will not only feature hundreds of thousands of AI-focused GPUs, but also require over 1,000 megawatts of electricity, or what amounts to a gigawatt.
“We're actually building several multi-GW (gigawatt) clusters,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. “We're calling the first one Prometheus and it's coming online in '26. We're also building Hyperion, which will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years.”
But Zuckerberg isn’t just settling for two mega data centers. In the same post, he wrote: “We're building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan.”
For perspective, the world’s leading supercomputer, El Capitan, uses only 30 megawatts, or about three times the amount of power used in the neighboring city of Livermore, California. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s xAI “Colossus” data center in Memphis has been estimated to use 150 megawatts, although that’s bound to grow as the facility expands.
Zuckerberg’s post is the latest sign of how aggressively the largest tech companies are racing to build AI that promises to surpass human intelligence. In addition to the data center push, Meta has been offering huge compensation packages, at up to over $100 million, to poach the top AI researchers from companies including OpenAI and Apple.
Meta's investment will raise questions about whether the bet pays off and if it takes an environmental toll. Zuckerberg didn’t mention how Meta plans on powering these upcoming mega data centers. But according to the research firm SemiAnalysis, the company is preparing to build natural gas plants to power the Prometheus data center, which is being built in Ohio.