Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed that Meta would spend hundreds of billions of dollars on developing artificial intelligence products in the near future and, to that end, construct a data center planned to be nearly the size of Manhattan.
The parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp is among the large tech companies that have struck high-profile deals, and doled out multimillion-dollar pay packages to AI researchers in recent months – some as high as $100m – to fast-track work on machines that could outthink humans on many tasks, a concept known as “super-intelligence” or “artificial general intelligence”.
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.
“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.
If it was really all that, Zuck wouldn’t be trying to sell it to us, he’d be hoarding it jealously and worshipping its very outputs like the second coming of some Lovecraftian deity.