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Mark Zuckerberg is building an AI engineer to help with coding tasks at Meta, and ramping up spending to $65 billion

By
Beatrice Nolan
Beatrice Nolan
Tech Reporter
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By
Beatrice Nolan
Beatrice Nolan
Tech Reporter
Down Arrow Button Icon
January 24, 2025, 11:31 AM ET
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg is ramping up spending on AI.Julia Demaree Nikhinson—Getty Images
  • Mark Zuckerberg is spending more than ever at Meta. The billionaire has announced plans to build a new data center and an “AI engineer.”

CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced a new spending plan for Meta that includes building an “AI engineer” to help with coding.

In a post on Facebook, Zuckerberg said Meta was building a new data center “so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan.”

Zuckerberg said he expected Meta AI to become “the leading assistant serving more than 1 billion people” and was building an “AI engineer” that would start contributing code to the company’s research and development efforts.

The company is investing between $60 billion and $65 billion in 2025 to help build out its AI infrastructure, a significant increase from the $38 billion to $40 billion Meta spent in 2024.

Zuckerberg also said Meta planned to end the year with more than 1.3 million GPUs, a significant increase on the company’s 2024 goals.

The chips, which are vital for training and powering AI systems, have been in short supply over the past two years as demand for them spiked. Big Tech companies have been fighting to stockpile some of the most powerful chips.

“This is a massive effort, and over the coming years it will drive our core products and business, unlock historic innovation, and extend American technology leadership. Let’s go build,” Zuckerberg wrote in the post.

Meta’s announcement comes just days after the company’s AI rival, OpenAI, announced a $500 billion AI infrastructure project backed by SoftBank and Oracle, among others.

The Stargate Project, announced by Donald Trump on Monday, plans to build out AI data centers in the U.S.

Representatives for Meta did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for more details on its plans.

AI vs. coding jobs

It’s not the first time Zuckerberg has suggested using AI to automate coding tasks internally.

In an interview on The Joe Rogan Experience earlier this month, Zuckerberg said he expected AI would soon be able to do the job of a “mid-level engineer” at Meta.

“Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code,” Zuckerberg said in the interview.

“In the beginning, it’ll be really expensive to run, and you can get it to be more efficient,” he added. “And over time it’ll get to the point where a lot of the code in our apps and including the AI that we generate is actually going to be built by AI engineers instead of people engineers.”

Meta’s Big Tech rival, Google, has also been experimenting with using AI to code internally.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said last year that more than a quarter of new code created at Google was being generated by AI and overseen by human engineers.

The trend has caused alarm among industry employees, especially computer science graduates trying to enter the sector in junior roles.

Fortune Brainstorm AI returns to San Francisco Dec. 8–9 to convene the smartest people we know—technologists, entrepreneurs, Fortune Global 500 executives, investors, policymakers, and the brilliant minds in between—to explore and interrogate the most pressing questions about AI at another pivotal moment. Register here.
About the Author
By Beatrice NolanTech Reporter
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Beatrice Nolan is a tech reporter on Fortune’s AI team, covering artificial intelligence and emerging technologies and their impact on work, industry, and culture. She's based in Fortune's London office and holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of York. You can reach her securely via Signal at beatricenolan.08

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