Forget mega yachts, AI data centers are quickly becoming the next battleground for billionaires as Zuckerberg pledges $65 billion CAPEX spend in 2025

Following $500 billion Project Stargate launch, Meta is also dolling out the dollars
Meta’s $65 billion is lower than Microsoft’s $80 billion commitment
AWS is set to spend more than $75 billion while Google has yet to say how much it will spend

If you have a few hundred billion dollars burning a hole in your pocket, you’re probably considering spending it on an AI data center or two. US President Donald Trump recently announced OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle would launch a new AI infrastructure venture called Project Stargate, investing $500 billion over four years across the US. OpenAI noted that $100 billion would be made available “immediately.”

Elon Musk, no stranger to building AI data centers and perhaps a bit miffed about being left out, claimed that Project Stargate doesn’t actually have the money, stating, “SoftBank has well under $10 billion secured.”

While that was unfolding, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made an announcement on Facebook, revealing the company is “building a 2GW+ data center so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan,” while also outlining other AI plans.

A defining year for AI

Zuckerberg’s full post reads: “This will be a defining year for AI. In 2025, I expect Meta AI will be the leading assistant, serving more than 1 billion people. Llama 4 will become the leading state-of-the-art model, and we’ll build an AI engineer that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to our R&D efforts. To power this, Meta is building a 2GW+ data center so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan. We’ll bring online ~1GW of compute in ’25 and end the year with more than 1.3 million GPUs. We’re planning to invest $60-65 billion in capex this year while also growing our AI teams significantly, and we have the capital to continue investing in the years ahead. 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!”

$65 billion on capital expenses certainly isn’t nothing, but it pales in comparison to the $80 billion Microsoft plans to invest in fiscal 2025 or the $75 billion-plus AWS intends to spend this year. We don’t know how much Google will be pumping into AI infrastructure, but it’s going to be a similar figure.

That said, Meta’s investment is higher than most would have expected. Reuters points out: “The $60 billion to $65 billion capital spending outlined for 2025 would mark a significant jump from the company’s estimated expenditure of $38 billion to $40 billion last year. It is also above analysts’ estimates of $50.25 billion for 2025, according to LSEG data.”