Mark Zuckerberg is betting up to $200 billion on an AI empire

Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Meta, which owns Facebook and WhatsApp, knew he was taking an enormous risk when he green-lit a commitment pegged at as much as $200 billion before there was proof it would work. Speaking on the Cheeky Pint podcast hosted by John Collison, the cofounder of Stripe, the payment processing company, Zuckerberg admitted he asked His top researcher if the gamble was safe.

Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer, appeared alongside Zuckerberg to discuss the superintelligence lab he leads. The pair launched Muse Wonder, the first frontier-class model from that lab, according to Fortune. Meta has guided for as much as $145 billion in capital expenditures this year, much of it going toward what Zuckerberg describes as a full-stack operation.

Meta builds its own data centers, its own chips, and its own low-level infrastructure to avoid the friction it faced for nearly two decades with Apple and Google, which control the world’s dominant smartphone platforms. In 2021, Apple let iPhone users block apps from tracking them, a change that Meta later said cost it about $10 billion in 2022 alone.

Unlike Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, Meta does not run a cloud business that rents data centers to outside customers, leaving it to shoulder those costs itself. Zuckerberg noted that a 1-gigawatt AI data center costs $50 billion to $60 billion to build and roughly $15 billion a year to operate, pointing to Meta’s Hyperion campus in Louisiana, which is designed to scale to five gigawatts.

Meta is also building a cloud business to sell AI computing power and weighing selling raw computing capacity. Zuckerberg and Wang want their AI agent, Muse, to act on people's behalf, ordering groceries and managing tasks. While advertising made up about 98% of Meta’s revenue last quarter, these AI agents could soon handle purchases directly, shifting how customers find your business online.