back to article Stargate, smargate. We're spending $60B+ on AI this year, Meta's Zuckerberg boasts

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed plans on Friday to blow through as much as $60 to 65 billion in 2025 on plenty more AI resources for his social media mega-corp – and signaled his intention to continue the spending spree for years to come. The announcement comes just days after rival model builder OpenAI unveiled, in a …

  1. The Central Scrutinizer Silver badge

    Imagine how much actual good you could do for that amount of money, instead of throwing it up against the AI wall.

    1. Juha Meriluoto

      My thoughts exactly...

    2. Grunchy Silver badge

      “Cinema Spectacles”

      For $60 billion I wonder if you could invent “movie goggles,” no seriously, hear me out.

      It’s a pair of glasses! But no ordinary glasses. Instead of corrective lenses, they instead feature miniature TV screens!

      Why, the effect is so powerful, it’s like a gigantic movie screen… but they’re built into your spectacles!

      With SIXTY BILLION we could perfect this revolutionary technology in no time flat.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: “Cinema Spectacles”

        we could perfect this revolutionary technology in no time flat.

        Ah, that's why they're called flatscreens?

        No, wait..

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      But...

      I can't imagine any way more effective at crippling AI than involving Oracle. Must be a Chinese plot.

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: But...

        More likely an Oracle plot.

  2. PCScreenOnly

    Metaverse

    Let's hope this goes the same way

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    How long until Florida Man...

    ...make them all fight each other?

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge

      Re: How long until Florida Man...

      I'm hoping he and Musk have a falling out soon and he appoints Zuckerberg his "Champion" to fight Musk... A Roman Gladiatorial contest

      1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: How long until Florida Man...

        Musk : No sir. We fight with cannon.

        Zuck : But I thought we were fighting with swords.

        Musk : Swords! What do you think this is, the middle ages? Only girls fight with swords these days. Stand by your gun sir.

        1. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge
          Alert

          Re: How long until Florida Man...

          Zuck: Biff! - lands a hook right on target

          Musk: Mummy!

          1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

            Re: How long until Florida Man...

            Musk is looking a bit "Trumpy" around the midriff, and since the upgrade the Z-1000 android is looking pretty mean

  4. may_i Silver badge

    Hopefully, not real money

    Do all these super rich tech people live in an echo chamber? They all seem to be drinking the same hemlock.

    Does anyone who doesn't have a bunch of cash in the game genuinely believe that these ML monstrosities are actually useful?

    1. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

      Re: Hopefully, not real money

      We have had people turn up here and say all our negative comments about machine learning are because we are trying to preserve our jobs. Evidence means nothing if you can convince the mark that the source is biased.

      1. IGotOut Silver badge

        Re: Hopefully, not real money

        My job isn't at risk from AI and I think it's the most monumental waste of money and resources this planet has ever seen.

        Is that better?

        1. Grunchy Silver badge

          Re: Hopefully, not real money

          “…the most monumental waste of money and resources this planet has ever seen…”

          Ah… cryptocurrency?

          AI isn’t a “complete” waste, I was able to use it to make a semi-crappy “Rembrandt” self portrait, after all.

          That’s more than “nothing” !

          1. ravenviz Silver badge

            Re: Hopefully, not real money

            Re: “Rembrandt” self portrait

            Did you ask it to include cats/your dinner in the rendering?

        2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: Hopefully, not real money

          Careful reading of OP suggests it's not saying what you think it's saying. Of course I may have misconstrued it.

    2. DS999 Silver badge

      Some believe that, yes

      Others may be skeptical but worry that if they're wrong they'll fall behind the competition.

      Plus announcing AI spending boosts the stock price and makes them richer. If they announced "AI is bs we won't be investing in that" the stock price would probably crash.

    3. Like a badger

      Re: Hopefully, not real money

      The problem is only half that the money thrown at AI won't generate the returns wanted by investors, it is equally the squeezing out of genuinely productive investment in the real economy.

      So AI investments are a double whammy - huge amounts thrown at a technology that won't deliver much, and reducing investment capacity in things that do have tangible benefits. Some of the money comes from those who have money to burn (Saudis, for example), but a lot seems to come from the totally opaque private equity sector who load up their investments with debt. When the bubble bursts, I suspect the banking sector will as usual run crying to government for a bail out on all the money they lent to businesses that could never repay them

      1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: Hopefully, not real money

        >it is equally the squeezing out of genuinely productive investment in the real economy.

        But they don't own the real economy

        1. ecofeco Silver badge

          Re: Hopefully, not real money

          Oh but they DO.

    4. ecofeco Silver badge
      Meh

      Re: Hopefully, not real money

      Yes.

      Yes.

      Yes. (Believe, as opposed to facts, being the operational word, Bitcoin anyone?)

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Opportunity knocking?

    Okay ... so OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX are putting $100 billions in AI this year ($500B over 5 years), Meta is putting $60-65 billion for more than 1.3 million GPUs (and a datacenter), xAI is expecting to up Colossus to 1 million GPUs too (from 100k or 200k), and Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are pledging at least $200 billion between them on AI infrastructure over the next year. Even ByteDance is looking to invest $6.8 billion overseas (out of $12 billion total) for the same. Worldwide, that'll be more than $1 trillion for datacenter systems and devices in 2025 ...

    Accordingly, should one invest (buy stocks) in Nvidia, AMD, Supermicro, ..., at this time? They were all down a bit today strangely enough (market correction?) ... Any other to consider seriously (in hardware/infrastructure) for the coming year, before the bubble of exuberance bursts (whenever that may be) iyho? Asking this for a friend who would like to retire in a couple of years ...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Opportunity knocking?

      A couple of years time eigh? Buy into tech recycling companies

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Opportunity knocking?

        Forward thinking ... nice! Especially as AI might eventually be used for this very purpose and so there could be a long tail to its eventual demise (robots recycling robots). That'd make it a great investment!

    2. EricM Silver badge

      Re: Opportunity knocking?

      > Any other to consider seriously (in hardware/infrastructure) for the coming year,

      AI is moving fast, capability increases are already levelling off. Making models just bigger is not really expected to solve hallucinations and outlier-answers, let alone create AGI.

      Lack of genuine human training data from before the AI era is already a limiting factor.

      500B$ to just scale up OpenAI GPT style approach? I have no idea what these guys are thinking. Smells like panic...

      So: A year until the bubble bursts might already be too optimistic at this point IMHO. And once the AI bubble bursts, the excess capacity in existing datacenters will be enormous.

      I am looking forward to extremely cheap cloud hosting in 1-2 years time.

      I will not recommend risking money on AI-related bets.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Opportunity knocking?

        I see your point. But then, that 500B$ has to go somewhere I think, and so if it doesn't end up in hardware/infrastructure, then maybe Electric Power production would be where to invest? (unless these Big-AI announcements are some scam to fool folks into investing where they really shouldn't -- sticking to non-foolish basics would then be the advice for pre-retirement?).

        Maybe all the devastation caused by climate change will actually make building supplies and construction a better investment opportunity than AI (with similar governmental sponsorship)?

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: Opportunity knocking?

          "But then, that 500B$ has to go somewhere I think"

          As the first post in these comments said - somewhere where it will do actual good. There are a lot of the world's problems - the real world - which that amount of money would ameliorate or even solve.

    3. DS999 Silver badge

      Re: Opportunity knocking?

      Yes you should invest in Nvidia. Two years ago when I did. Or better yet 5+ years ago like some people smarter than me did. Today? I'm not sure it has that much further to run. Definitely no more doublings left in it.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Opportunity knocking?

        Thanks! That's what my friend was wondering about and it does look like Nvidia has plateaud (around $140) for the past 3 months. However, AMD's in a bit of a lull ($120) with room to rebound, especially if they put some performant ARM chiplets in some of their MI300A-like devices, diversifying their offerings to meet this broadening in market demand (on top of benefiting from their recent software stack enhancements). I'll let him/her know about this ...

      2. DS999 Silver badge

        Re: Opportunity knocking?

        Hopefully you didn't invest Friday, because you could have got it a lot cheaper today lol

    4. alcomatt

      Re: Opportunity knocking?

      meanwhile, in China: https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1

      1. Scene it all

        Re: Opportunity knocking?

        Deepseek was developed from scratch, in two months, at a cost of $6 million. I wonder where these OpenAI billions are going.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Opportunity knocking?

          It appears the US is discovering (again) that there are smart people in China too. Worse, tariffs won't noticeably slow them down coming up with their own ideas either.

        2. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

          Re: I wonder where these OpenAI billions are going

          Offshore Tax havens?

          You know for when the AI bubble bursts.

          Much like the Trump meme coin. No honestly, it is not an investment yet people have done just that with their life savings. The only winner(s) are those who got in on Day 1 and cashed out on Day 2 or just before it crashed. Not, an investment. There be leopards about to eat your face if you believed that.

      2. ecofeco Silver badge

        Re: Opportunity knocking?

        Yep. Saw this a few days ago. Deepseek destroys all other competition on price. It's not even close.

        American tech douche bros are in trouble. This $60 billion announcement is just a pump and dump.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The Big Tech problem - solved!

    So the big tech co's are going to destroy themselves by dumping every last dollar into "AI". Ok?

    And whatever comes out the other side ..... will be a shadow of their former selves? nVidia will be on top, but grown like a pimple that needs to be popped; Goggle, MS, Meta will be dried out husks, our planet will be 3 deg C warmer, and all tech co's will be about the same size, with no one company standing out. (Probably Oracle - they don't seem to be playing the AI game. Amazon too - they're getting the hardware on someone else's dollar, and they can use it as they please.)

    Huh.

    Of that 100B that OpenAI claimed, someone else (Musk?) said "I haven't seen the money," but if Meta's throwing them 60B, Softbank 10B, MS 80B, they have 150B so far? Maybe it's not all for OpenAI, but probably a lot of it.

    1. iron

      Re: The Big Tech problem - solved!

      > Oracle - they don't seem to be playing the AI game

      Lesurie Suit Larry is literally part of the 500 beeelion dollar OpenAI & Softbank deal mentioned in the article.

      Oracle are touting their cloud as the best for AI.

      They are very much rolling the dice and moving the top hat round the AI board.

  7. Detective Emil

    A modest proposal

    It's time that Meta was renamed again, to Aïda. (Just don't tell Mr, Zuckerberg that the eponymous heroine dies in the final act of Verdi's opera.)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: A modest proposal

      I like this Aïda better (you'll need the subtitles), and there was nothing artificial involved either :).

  8. ComputerSays_noAbsolutelyNo Silver badge
    Coat

    All that money thrown away ...

    for a couple of annoying Clippys, which will make people angrily click away or devise schemes to protect themselves.

    Is there something akin to the pihole for AI?

    aiHole? nayI? gptOff?

    -> Where's my de-AI-inizer? I swear I got in one of my pockets

    1. Inventor of the Marmite Laser Silver badge

      Re: All that money thrown away ...

      Not on your NellAI

  9. Tron Silver badge

    There is no business case.

    Capitalism 101 does not suggest spending a tonne of cash on something that few people want, hardly anyone trusts and fewer will pay for.

    That goes double considering the half life on a GPU or NPU nowadays. These data centres will burn money to produce e-waste.

    The VC gambit, spend now, make it essential and people will pay for it, just doesn't seem valid.

    They may be hoping that Trump will consider this a national security issue and take over the whole thing with taxpayers' money. National interest pissing competitions have a long history - the most aircraft carriers, the most powerful supercomputers, more nukes etc.

    I agree with the first comment. Think of the good they could do with this cash - green transition, healthcare, poverty reduction, ending wars. Instead they waste it on crap we don't want, don't need and make an effort to disable on our systems.

    This is a tech forum, and there is no more love for the AI scam on here than there was for Harpo's Metaverse.

    AI is an unreliable, experimental tech, repackaged and sold as a magical cure for everything. Tech snake oil.

    AI is making a difference, but not the one they want. The next generation of GAFA tech - Recall, Clippy AI - is something we actively need to avoid. We need an alternative. We need a new mainstream OS, without the political drama, bloat and geek arrogance of Linux holding it back.

    1. Ian Johnston Silver badge

      Re: There is no business case.

      Capitalism 101 does not suggest spending a tonne of cash on something that few people want, hardly anyone trusts and fewer will pay for.

      The point is not to make money for investors. Fuck them. The point is to enable the companies' management to extract tens of millions - or more - personally before the bubble bursts. And it's not as if the US has a president who would see anything whatsoever wrong with that.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: There is no business case.

        Pres 47 is leading the way with his $TRUMP coin !!!!

        Nicely lined his pockets with that one, from Day One !!!

        Don't expect Pres 47 to have ANY scruples regarding how you get 'RICH' !!!

        Legal/illegal doesn't matter if your Bank Balance is getting bigger & bigger !!!

        Now it has been proven beyond doubt that being 'President' means you are beyond the law, there are no limits ... it also helps if you have 'loaded the bases' so to speak by appointing the 'right' sort of people into the highest courts !!!

        'Law & Justice' is up for grabs for the people with the deepest of pockets !!!

        The lie of the US of A being the 'Beacon of Democracy and the home of Law & order' is now manifest.

        There have been real doubts for generations, if you were the wrong Demographic, BUT now there are no more attempts to hide/deny the truth.

        The US of A is ruled by Oligarchies, some very familiar ... some not !!!

        Power/Money/Influence works just the same in EVERY Country !!!

        National boundaries mean little, if you have enough money !!!

        Welcome to the 'Dystopian future' you thought was a hackneyed old Hollywood script !!!

        :)

        1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

          Re: There is no business case.

          >Pres 47 is leading the way with his $TRUMP coin !!!!

          At least the publicity around the pump and dump has done great things for public acceptance of crypto in general

    2. ecofeco Silver badge

      Re: There is no business case.

      Nothing is holding Linux back except FUD and large scale corporate conflict of interest.

      1. Zolko Silver badge

        Re: There is no business case.

        I'm still waiting for generalized userland drivers in Linux

  10. Dizzy Dwarf

    Someone should train a LLM on Trump's decrees

    The data set is more than big enough.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Someone should train a LLM on Trump's decrees

      You cannot 'Train' an LLM on a random distribution of Data, there are NO trends or meaningful rational to be found !!!

      Remember the old adage ... GIGO !!!

      :)

      1. klh

        Re: Someone should train a LLM on Trump's decrees

        That's literally what LMMs are trained on. Garbage in, garbage out - you'd get an ExecutiveOrderGPT with output similar in "quality" to the original.

  11. blu3b3rry

    This feels like it's going to descend into some kind of dick measuring contest over who can waste the most money on AI datacentres....

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Going to?

      1. blu3b3rry

        I sit corrected, after all anything Musk et al get involved in descends into infantile "but mine's bigger" discourse.

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          And they're all dicks.

          Hmmm. I wonder what they really do measure.

  12. ravenviz Silver badge

    Metafail

    Conspicuous expenditure, energy use, poverty, environment, etc.

  13. Omnipresent Silver badge
    Big Brother

    after everyone stops wondering why

    These guys see things differently than you, You might stop to consider there is a bigger, more insidious plan at work here.

    Larry Ellison enters stage left, and now open ai and he are in talks to buy tik tok, and all that data goes right into the skynet.

    Every thought, every face, every location, every home, every view, every child.

    Right into big brother you go.

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: after everyone stops wondering why

      Oracle already has all the data - they run tiktok's backend.

      What he wants is editorial control on what users see

      1. Omnipresent Silver badge

        Re: after everyone stops wondering why

        Looks like open ai, what ever musks deviant abomination is called, and google are all aiming towards the same data, and that's tiktoks.

        I'm fairly sure meta is paying people to walk around collecting data with those illegal glasses of his at this point. Tax software, and all kinds of businesses use meta data, so he probably feels like he has the data collection he needs, and will just take advantage of the situation. As long as people use whatsapp, and insta.... he has his. He might have the world's largest depository of data. He's been collecting it longer. He'll probably just keep selling it off to whoever wants it for the rest of his days, and paying off the mob to look the other way.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: after everyone stops wondering why

      You're 100% correct.

      Unfortunately, 80% of the population mutter; "they would never do that here, this is the US or UK or France .... China, North Korea, well they're different to us, no of course I'm not racist ..."

  14. Mitoo Bobsworth Silver badge

    Obscene amount of money

    For an obscene amount of self interest.

  15. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

    Popcorn time

    This is like Y2K when advertising impressions were going to make everybody billionaires. Nobody ever considered whether or not the revenue could scale. During an all-hands with my Y2K employer, it was pointed out that customer growth projections crossed global population projections. Investors didn't care about math or logic because they were,on paper, making money. The truth was that the market had already saturated years ago and nearly all of the projected revenue was a massive math error caused by circular cycles in advertisement resales.

    AI is amazing. I use it, and there are lots of uses for it, but how is Meta is going to recover over $60B from it? Maybe a fraction of that if their VR headset was doing better. The money makers will be low budget stealth companies that use it to assist with generating video entertainment. That's movies, games, and porn.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Popcorn time

      Ah paper money or just digits on a memory chip. We were doomed on the 15th August 1971 when Nixon admitted they didn't have the gold by leaving the standard because people (countries) started asking for their gold back.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    AI Island

    How about all these tech bros start up their own AI island. A place where egos have space to grow and AI looks after everything. Young tech hopefuls can visit to learn from the experts and solicit seed funding.

    Dinner is at 8, when they can get the vending machine to work.

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    They'll spend the money if they can see a way to a return. People should be asking about that.

  18. Locomotion69 Bronze badge
    Mushroom

    So this is how black holes are created.

    For this amount of money, some AI Service Provision is made, which swallows data+money, and those providing that data and money are hopefully looking to the event horizon for something remotely usefull coming out....

    Meta is the only winner here.

    Icon to picture the Hope of the Customer.

  19. codejunky Silver badge

    Cool

    As far as AI goes I expect a lot of it will result in nothing useful with few actual useful applications. A lot of people on these comment sections seem to be as pessimistic about AI or more too. So surely we should all see this as a good thing as those with vast quantities of money spend it on something that works through the economy and into peoples pockets and for those envious of the wealthy, the wealthy lose money on it.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Cool

      Communist.

      1. codejunky Silver badge

        Re: Cool

        @AC

        "Communist."

        Thats a stupid comment. Private capital doing private investment is anything but communist.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Cool

          Follow the money.

          1. codejunky Silver badge

            Re: Cool

            @AC

            "Follow the money."

            Private investors pending their money on their pet project which goes through the economy for everyone involved in working on the project and their day to day spending to others and so on through the economy

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Cool

              You need to do just a bit more (of your own) research. Keep going.

  20. GioCiampa

    Naive thought of the day...

    How about they spend (some of) the money fixing the existing pile of junk that is the codebase...?

  21. David Hicklin Silver badge

    Burn Baby, Burn

    Your way through a wad load of $$$$

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