Meta
xAI CEO throws a jab at Meta’s Manhattan size AI data center plan
Meta has embarked on a journey to build superintelligence and plans to construct an AI data center equivalent in size of Manhattan city, but xAI CEO, Elon Musk, doesn’t believe in this statement and called it “Rookie numbers”.
Musk’s comment on this matter reflects a competitive jab at Meta’s hundreds-of-billion-dollar investment plan to boost artificial intelligence research, which includes a 5GW project called Hyperion. This much power can fulfill the needs of a small city.
The comparison with Manhattan shows the scale that Zuckerberg’s company is aiming for. However, Meta wants to start with a 1 GW super cluster named Prometheus, coming online in 2026. On the other hand, Hyperion is slated for construction in Louisiana, where Meta previously committed to a $10 billion data center development.
Compared to Premethus, this new data center will increase energy consumption to 5GW once it’s fully operational. Zuckerberg said Meta aims to deploy more than 1.3 million GPUs by the end of this year for AI improvements, including Meta AI and Llama 4, as well as upcoming models. However, getting such GPU quantity could be challenging due to constrained semiconductor supply.
Currently, Meta has committed more than $60 billion in capital expenditures for 2025 alone, twice compared to 2024 estimates. It is planning to get additional investments of more than $70 billion with partnerships. This investment will grow from next year onwards.
Meta CEO has already started working on how he is gonna turn plans into projects. For that, he has conducted a talent acquisition spree across the industry, poaching talent from Apple, OpenAI, Anthropic, and some major AI companies. One of the most notable bids comes as Apple’s head of foundation model, Ruoming Pang, who reportedly received $100 million on signing.
These development comes as xAI recently released the Grok 4 model, which has achieved the highest benchmarks among all generative AI models to date. Meanwhile, Meta’s Llama is falling way behind in the competition.
