31 Jan at 10:04

Zuckerberg shrugs off DeepSeek, vows to spend hundreds of billions on AI

deepseek, DeepSeek-R1, Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, AI, IA

U.S. markets panicked on Monday over speculation that DeepSeek’s AI models would crush demand for GPUs. Because of that Nvidia’s stock dropped almost 20%.

But Meta isn’t backing off. With its CEO Mr. Mark Zuckerberg pledging that the tech giant would invest “very heavily” in AI. Even “hundreds of billions of dollars” — over the long term, he said during Meta’s first-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.

In a Facebook post Friday, Zuckerberg said that Meta expects to spend $60 billion-$80 billion on CapEx in 2025. Primarily on data centers and growing the company’s AI development teams. That projected range is around double the $35 billion-$40 billion Meta spent on CapEx last year.

Zuckerberg also wrote that Meta plans to bring around one gigawatt of compute online this year. It’s roughly the amount of power consumed by 750,000 average homes. And he expects the company’s data centers to pack over 1.3 million GPUs by year-end.

Zuckerberg’s Investment

As part of the investment, Meta will ramp up hiring for artificial intelligence roles. And build a more than 2-gigawatt data center that would be large enough to cover a significant part of Manhattan.

In response to an analyst’s question about DeepSeek’s impact on Meta’s AI spending, Mr. Zuckerberg said spending heavily on AI infrastructure will continue to be a “strategic advantage” for Meta.

Meta considers DeepSeek a new competitor and is learning from it, but it’s “way too early” to tell if demand for chips will stop increasing as they remain crucial for inference purposes, Mr. Mark Zuckerberg said, noting that Meta has billions of users.

“At this point, I would bet that the ability to build out that kind of infrastructure is going to be a major advantage for both the quality of the service and being able to serve the scale that we want to,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.

Meta’s goal with its next model, Llama 4, is to make it the world’s most competitive, even compared to closed models (like ChatGPT), Mr. Mark Zuckerberg said. He added that he expects it to have agentic capabilities — something both OpenAI and Anthropic have moved into — along with multimodal ones.