Meta has announced a new program called Meta Compute as it moves to scale up the infrastructure needed to support its growing artificial intelligence operations.
Energy And Capacity Targets
Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the company plans to expand its energy footprint sharply over the coming years. In a post on Threads, he said Meta intends to build tens of gigawatts of capacity this decade and hundreds of gigawatts or more over time. A gigawatt is equal to one billion watts of power, and rising demand from AI systems has raised expectations that electricity use in the United States could increase from about 5 gigawatts to as much as 50 over the next decade.
The new initiative follows comments made last year by Meta chief financial officer Susan Li, who said that building leading AI infrastructure would be central to developing the company’s models and products.
Leadership Of The Program
Zuckerberg named three executives to lead the effort. Santosh Janardhan, Meta’s head of global infrastructure, will oversee technical architecture, software, silicon programs, developer productivity, and the operation of Meta’s global data center network. Janardhan has been with the company since 2009.
Daniel Gross, who joined Meta last year and co founded Safe Superintelligence with former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, will lead a new team focused on long term capacity planning, supplier partnerships, industry analysis, and business modeling.
Dina Powell McCormick, Meta’s president and vice chairman, will work with governments on building, deploying, investing in, and financing the company’s infrastructure projects.
Industry Context
Meta’s move comes as major technology companies race to build cloud and data center environments capable of supporting generative AI. Microsoft has been expanding partnerships with infrastructure providers, and Alphabet announced the acquisition of data center firm Intersect in December.
Featured image credits: Wikimedia Commons
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