Last year, Meta shared its capital expenditure forecasts, signaling significant planned investments to expand capacity for its artificial intelligence operations. During an earnings call last summer, Chief Financial Officer Susan Li explained, “We expect that developing leading AI infrastructure will be a core advantage in developing the best AI models and product experiences.” The company is now following through on that commitment.

On Monday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced Meta Compute, a new initiative aimed at strengthening the company’s AI infrastructure. In a Threads post, Zuckerberg outlined plans to substantially increase Meta’s energy capacity in the years ahead. “Meta is planning to build tens of gigawatts this decade, and hundreds of gigawatts or more over time. How we engineer, invest, and partner to build this infrastructure will become a strategic advantage,” he stated. For context, a gigawatt represents one billion watts of electrical power.

The growing demands of AI are expected to drive a sharp rise in U.S. electricity consumption over the next decade, with some estimates projecting an increase from 5 gigawatts to 50 gigawatts.

Zuckerberg also announced the leadership team for this project. Santosh Janardhan, Meta’s head of global infrastructure and a company veteran since 2009, will oversee technical architecture, software development, silicon programs, developer productivity, and the operation of global data centers and networks.

Another key leader is Daniel Gross, who joined Meta last year. Gross co-founded Safe Superintelligence with former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and will now head a new internal group focused on long-term capacity planning, supplier partnerships, industry analysis, and business modeling.

Additionally, Dina Powell McCormick, a former government official recently appointed as Meta’s president and vice chairman, will manage government relations to support the development, deployment, and financing of Meta’s infrastructure.

The push to develop cloud environments capable of supporting generative AI is highly competitive. Last year’s capital expenditure forecasts revealed that many of Meta’s industry peers share similar ambitions. Microsoft has actively formed partnerships with AI infrastructure providers, while Google’s parent company, Alphabet, acquired data center firm Intersect in December.