Meta’s AI spending spree continues. After reportedly offering tens (or in some cases, hundreds) of millions of dollars to lure away top researchers from competing artificial intelligence operations, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced via Threads that the company plans to build several multi-gigawatt superclusters to ramp up its compute power.
Zuckerberg said the first of the superclusters, called Prometheus, will come online sometime in 2026, with “multiple more titan clusters” to follow. According to Zuck, “Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan.” According to a report from SemiAnalysis, an AI research firm, Prometheus is being built in Ohio. Another one of its clusters, reportedly named Hyperion, is currently being built in Louisiana and is expected to go online in 2027.
A supercluster is an interconnected network of compute resources, including graphics processing units (GPUs) or tensor processing units (TPUs), designed to do the kind of large-scale data processing needed to train AI models. Most active clusters built to support AI efforts have hundreds of megawatts of electrical power capacity. Meta’s gigawatt approach would theoretically give it a leg up in compute capabilities, and Zuckerberg claims that Meta is on pace to be the first to bring a supercluster with gigawatt capacity online.
Elon Musk might dispute that last achievement. Earlier this year, he claimed that xAI, his AI project behind Grok, was working on its next-generation data center and that it would be the “first gigawatt AI training supercluster.” So I guess we’ve got ourselves an old-fashioned showdown to see who actually gets their data center online first.
Musk’s project in Memphis, Tennessee, and Zuck’s in Ohio have something in common other than the goal of achieving gigawatt capacity for a supercluster data center: they both have some major environmental concerns. As Musk has ramped up construction in Memphis, the company reportedly brought in 35 portable methane gas turbines without air permits to power the project. Those turbines, capable of providing power to a neighborhood of 50,000 homes, could also emit up to 130 tons of harmful nitrogen oxides per year, per NPR.
Meta’s project in Ohio doesn’t appear to be much cleaner. According to SemiAnalysis, Meta is building two separate 200MW on-site natural gas plants to help meet the energy demands of its data center. While natural gas plants are cleaner than alternatives like coal (which the Trump administration has given AI companies the go-ahead to use if they want), they still produce a considerable amount of pollutants, including nitrogen oxides linked to heightened cancer risks for exposed communities.
Earlier this year, Zuckerberg pledged to drop up to $72 billion on AI projects to compete with the OpenAIs and xAIs of the world. It might be nice if he spent a fraction of that on making sure those projects aren’t significantly harming the quality of life of people who have the misfortune of living near his data centers.
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