Mark Zuckerberg says Meta is launching its personal AI infrastructure initiative

When Meta introduced capital expenditure projections final yr, the corporate made it recognized that it deliberate to spend massive to construct out capability for its AI enterprise. “We count on that creating main AI infrastructure can be a core benefit in creating the perfect AI fashions and product experiences,” stated Susan Li, Meta CFO, throughout an earnings name final summer time.

Now the tech large seems to be making good on that promise. On Monday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of Meta Compute, a brand new initiative designed to bolster the tech large’s AI infrastructure. Zuckerberg stated the corporate supposed to drastically increase its power footprint within the coming years.

“Meta is planning to construct tens of gigawatts this decade, and a whole bunch of gigawatts or extra over time. How we engineer, make investments, and companion to construct this infrastructure will turn into a strategic benefit,” Zuckerberg stated in a submit on Threads.

For reference, a gigawatt is a measurement {of electrical} energy equal to a billion watts. The energy-hungry AI enterprise signifies that America’s electrical consumption may spike exponentially over the following decade (from 5 GW to 50, in accordance with one estimate).

Zuckerberg has named three executives that he says can be spearheading the brand new venture. A kind of folks is Santosh Janardhan, the corporate’s head of worldwide infrastructure. Janardhan, who has been with the company since 2009, will lead work on “technical structure, software program stack, silicon program, developer productiveness, and constructing and working our international datacenter fleet and community,” Zuckerberg stated.

Additionally concerned is Daniel Gross, who joined the corporate simply final yr. Gross is the co-founder of Safe Superintelligence, together with former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. Zuckerberg stated that Gross could be main a brand new group inside Meta that’s “answerable for long-term capability technique, provider partnerships, business evaluation, planning, and enterprise modeling.”

Lastly, Zuckerberg stated that Dina Powell McCormick, a former authorities official who recently joined Meta as the corporate’s president and vice chairman, could be answerable for working with governments to assist “construct, deploy, put money into, and finance Meta’s infrastructure.”

There’s clearly a race to construct out generative AI-ready cloud environments, and Capex projections introduced final yr confirmed most of Meta’s friends had related ambitions. Microsoft has been busy partnering with AI infrastructure providers wherever it may possibly, and in December, Google dad or mum firm Alphabet introduced the acquisition of information middle agency Intersect. TechCrunch reached out to Meta for extra details about the brand new initiative.