When Meta unveiled its capital expenditure forecast last year, the company indicated plans for substantial investments to expand its AI business capabilities. Meta's CFO Susan Li stated during last summer's earnings call, "We anticipate that developing leading AI infrastructure will be a core advantage in creating the best AI models and product experiences."

Now, the tech giant appears to be delivering on that commitment. On Monday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of Meta Compute, a new initiative designed to enhance the company's AI infrastructure. Zuckerberg noted that Meta plans to significantly increase its energy footprint in the coming years.

"Meta intends to build tens of gigawatts within this decade, gradually scaling to hundreds of gigawatts or more in the future. How we design, invest, and collaborate to construct this infrastructure will become a strategic advantage," Zuckerberg said in a Threads post.

For context, a gigawatt is a unit of electrical power equivalent to one billion watts. The energy-intensive nature of AI operations suggests U.S. electricity consumption could grow exponentially over the next decade—from 5 gigawatts to 50, according to one estimate.

Zuckerberg named three executives he believes will lead this new project. One is the company's Global Head of Infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan. Janardhan, who joined Meta in 2009, will oversee "technical architecture, software stack, silicon initiatives, developer productivity, and the construction and operation of our global data center fleet and network," Zuckerberg explained.

Also involved is Daniel Gross, who joined the company just last year. Gross is a co-founder of Safe Superintelligence, which he established alongside former OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever. Zuckerberg mentioned that Gross will lead a new internal team at Meta focused on "long-term capacity strategy, supplier partnerships, industry analysis, planning, and business modeling."

Finally, Zuckerberg stated that former government official Dina Powell McCormick, who recently joined Meta as President and Vice Chair, will handle collaborations with governments to help "build, deploy, invest in, and fund Meta's infrastructure."

Clearly, a race is underway to construct cloud environments suitable for generative AI, and last year's capital expenditure forecasts revealed that most of Meta's peers share similar ambitions. Microsoft has been actively partnering with AI infrastructure providers, while in December, Google's parent company Alphabet announced its acquisition of data center firm Intersect.