Meta Plans to Invest $60 bn or More in AI this Year

A photograph taken during the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos on January 19, 2025, shows the logo of Meta, the US company that owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp. (Photo by Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP)
A photograph taken during the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos on January 19, 2025, shows the logo of Meta, the US company that owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp. (Photo by Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP)
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Meta Plans to Invest $60 bn or More in AI this Year

A photograph taken during the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos on January 19, 2025, shows the logo of Meta, the US company that owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp. (Photo by Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP)
A photograph taken during the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos on January 19, 2025, shows the logo of Meta, the US company that owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp. (Photo by Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP)

Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg on Friday said the tech giant plans to invest at least $60 billion in artificial intelligence in 2025, aiming to lead in the technology.
"This will be a defining year for AI," Zuckerberg said in a post on his Facebook page.

Zuckerberg expects Meta AI to be the top digital assistant, used by more than a billion people, and for the tech firm's Llama 4 to be at the forefront of AI models, according to the post.

Meta is creating an AI "engineer" to contribute computer coding to its research and development efforts, he explained.

Meta will construct a massive new datacenter to power its AI ambitions and is planning $60 billion to $65 billion in capital expenditures this year related to the technology, according to Zuckerberg, AFP reported.

"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," he said.

The post comes just days after US President Donald Trump announced a major investment to build infrastructure for artificial intelligence led by Japanese giant SoftBank and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.

Trump said the venture, called Stargate, "will invest $500 billion, at least, in AI infrastructure in the United States."

But in a post on his social media platform X, Trump ally and tech tycoon Elon Musk said the main investors "don't actually have the money."

The comment marked a rare instance of a split between the world's richest man and Trump, with Musk playing a key role in the newly installed administration after spending $270 million on the election campaign.

Microsoft president Brad Smith, meanwhile, has gone on record saying the company was on pace this fiscal year to invest about $80 billion to build out AI datacenters, train AI models and deploy cloud-based applications around the world.

"The United States is poised to stand at the forefront of this new technology wave, especially if it doubles down on its strengths and effectively partners internationally," Smith said in an online post.



Meta Seeks Urgent Fix to AI Chatbot’s Confusion on Name of US President 

The logo of Meta is seen at the entrance of the company's temporary stand ahead of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland January 18, 2025.  (Reuters)
The logo of Meta is seen at the entrance of the company's temporary stand ahead of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland January 18, 2025. (Reuters)
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Meta Seeks Urgent Fix to AI Chatbot’s Confusion on Name of US President 

The logo of Meta is seen at the entrance of the company's temporary stand ahead of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland January 18, 2025.  (Reuters)
The logo of Meta is seen at the entrance of the company's temporary stand ahead of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland January 18, 2025. (Reuters)

The inability of Meta's AI chatbot to identify the current president of the United States was elevated to urgent status by the Facebook owner this week, requiring a fast fix, a person familiar with the issue said.

Republican Donald Trump was inaugurated as president on Monday, succeeding Democrat Joe Biden. Yet on Thursday, the Meta AI chatbot was still saying that Biden was president, according to the source and to a Reuters test of the service.

Asked by Reuters on Thursday to name the president, Meta AI replied:

"The current president of the United States is Joe Biden. However, according to the most recent information available, Donald Trump was sworn in as the president on January 20, 2025."

The issue prompted Meta to initiate an emergency procedure it uses to troubleshoot urgent problems with its services, known within the company as a SEV, or "site event," according to the person familiar with the work.

Asked to comment, Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts said: "Everyone knows the President of the United States is Donald Trump. All generative AI systems sometimes return outdated results, and we will continue to improve our features.”

He did not comment on what emergency procedures, if any, Meta had implemented.

It was at least the third emergency procedure Meta has experienced this week related to the US presidential transition, the source told Reuters.

The incidents drew widespread complaints from social media watchers scrutinizing Meta's platforms for signs of politicized shifts after CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared at Trump's inauguration on Monday and instituted a series of changes in recent weeks aimed at mending relations with the incoming administration.

Those changes included scrapping its US fact-checking program, elevating Republican Joel Kaplan as its new chief global affairs officer, electing a close friend of Trump's to its board and ending its diversity programs.

In one incident this week, Meta appeared to be forcing some users to re-follow the profiles of Trump, Vice President JD Vance and first lady Melania Trump on Facebook and Instagram, even after the users had unfollowed those accounts.

That issue cropped up during the company's normal practice of transferring official White House social media accounts to new control when a presidential administration changes, the company said on Wednesday.

In this case, an error occurred because the transfer process was prolonged and the system failed to log "unfollow" requests from users while it was under way, prompting a top priority SEV1, the person said.

Another emergency procedure involved an issue in which Meta's Instagram service blocked searches for the hashtags #Democrat and #Democrats for some users, while turning up results without issue for #Republican.

A Meta spokesperson acknowledged the problem on Tuesday but said it affected "people's ability to search for a number of different hashtags on Instagram - not just those on the left."