Meta to spend up to $72B on AI infrastructure in 2025 as compute arms race escalates

Meta pours money into the physical and technical infrastructure that is needed to scale its AI ambitions. The company said on Wednesday in the profit of the second quarter that it is planning to more than double its expenditure on building AI infrastructure, such as data centers and servers.

“We currently expect that 2025 capital spending, including main payments on financial leases, will be in the range of $ 66-72 billion … at the center of about $ 30 billion at the center,” Meta said.

That is an aggressive capex growth, and one that is planning to continue until 2026. The company said it expects a similar large increase in expenditure on AI infrastructure, while the company remains “aggressive [pursue] possibilities to offer extra capacity online to meet the needs of [its] Artificial intelligence efforts and business activities. “

“We expect that the development of leading AI infrastructure will be a core advantage in the development of the best AI models and producer experiences, so we expect to sign up our investments considerably in 2026 to support that work,” said Susan Li, Meta CFO, during the company’s Wednesday call.

Li also noted that although Meta expects to finance most of its AI expenditure, the company is investigating ways to collaborate with financial partners to develop data centers together.

“We have no definitive transactions to announce, but we are generally of the opinion that here will be models that will attract considerable external financing to support large -scale data center projects that have been developed with the help of our world -class infrastructure, while we offer flexibility as our infrastructure requirements,” said.

Meta has announced two large AI “Titan Clusters”. The first is Prometheus in Ohio, which is ready as one of the first AI -Superclusters that touch 1 gigawatt of compute power when it comes online in 2026. Then there is Hyperion, a cluster in Louisiana that meta ceo mark Zuckerberg would have a footprint that could be the scaling of the scaling of the size of 5 Gigawatt. Moreover, Meta has several other non-mentioned Titan scale clusters underway.

Meta’s data center projects promise to absorb sufficient energy to provide millions of houses with electricity, so that the electricity is drawn from nearby communities. One of the projects of the company in Newton County, Georgia, already has that ensured that the water taps were dry in the houses of some residents.

Meta also noted in his winning report that it is expected that his second largest motivation of growth is the compensation of employees, since the company spends millions and possibly even billions, to poach talented AI engineers and researchers to work for the newly formed business unit of Meta, Superintelligence Labs.

Before income, Zuckerberg shared his vision on ‘personal super intelligence’, the idea that AI should help individual people to live their best life, mainly through the medium of smart glasses of meta and virtual reality headsets.

The shares of Meta rose by 10% in after-hours when investors responded to Meta’s general performance in the quarter and a better than expected prospects for the third quarter. Meta reported a turnover of $ 47.5 billion in the second quarter, with expectations to reach between $ 47.5 billion and $ 50.5 billion in Q3. Advertisements raised the income profits of Meta, fed by AI-tools such as AI-driven translations and video generation to help create more meaningful and targeted campaigns.

However, the company’s reality laboratory segment saw a loss of $ 4.5 billion.

This article has been updated to display the extra paths of Meta to finance the AI infrastructure structure.