Meta Platforms is making an unprecedented commitment to artificial intelligence, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg announcing plans to invest up to $65 billion in AI infrastructure throughout 2025.
The investment represents a significant increase from Meta's estimated $38-40 billion expenditure in 2024 and exceeds analysts' expectations of $50.25 billion for 2025. "This will be a defining year for AI," Zuckerberg stated in January, emphasizing that this massive effort will drive the company's core products and business in the coming years.
A cornerstone of this investment is the completion of a $10 billion AI-optimized data center in Richland Parish, northeast Louisiana. This facility, spanning 4 million square feet on a 2,250-acre site, will be Meta's largest data center globally and is designed to process the enormous amounts of data required for AI workloads. The project is expected to create 500 direct jobs and over 1,000 indirect jobs in the region, with construction continuing through 2030.
The Louisiana data center will play a crucial role in supporting Meta's AI initiatives, including the development of its Llama large language model family. In April 2025, Meta released Llama 4, featuring multimodal capabilities that can process text, images, and other data types. The company is also developing an even more powerful model called Behemoth, which reportedly has 288 billion active parameters.
Beyond infrastructure, Meta is aggressively expanding its AI talent pool. Zuckerberg expects Meta AI, the company's virtual assistant available across its platforms, to serve more than one billion users in 2025. In May, he confirmed the assistant had already reached this milestone. The company aims to make Meta AI "the leading personal AI with an emphasis on personalization, voice conversations and entertainment."
This massive investment demonstrates Meta's strategic prioritization of AI as central to its future, positioning the company to compete more aggressively with other tech giants in the AI space. As Zuckerberg noted, "We have the capital to continue investing in the years ahead," signaling Meta's long-term commitment to advancing next-generation AI capabilities.