Meta is going to “invest hundreds of billions of dollars” to deliver superintelligence.
Meta is going to “invest hundreds of billions of dollars” to deliver superintelligence, an artificial intelligence system that outperforms humans. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company is building two massive data centres that will supply the necessary computational power for this goal.
These data centres, named #Prometheus and #Hyperion, will produce multiple gigawatts of energy for training and running the superintelligent system. Prometheus will be based in New Albany, Ohio, and is expected to come online in 2026. Hyperion will be built in Louisiana and is anticipated to be online by 2030, according to the BBC.
“We’re building multiple more titan clusters as well,” Zuckerberg wrote in a series of posts on Threads. “Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan.” For reference, Manhattan has an area of 59 km2.
He went on to say that Hyperion “will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years,” positioning it among the largest data centres in the world. Currently, the largest individual facility by capacity is the China Telecom Inner Mongolia Park, which has a capacity of approximately 0.15 GW.
Many of Meta’s competitors have multi-gigawatt sites planned, including Oracle, Google, OpenAI, and Amazon. TechRepublic recently reported that Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary is building the world’s largest AI data center in Canada.
Large-scale data centres pose environmental and community risks
One gigawatt of energy can provide electricity to roughly 750,000 homes, and large-scale data centres have been known to cause power outages due to the pressure they place on the grid. They also strain water supplies and increase air pollution, resulting in pushback from those living in their vicinity.
One of Meta’s data centres in Newton County, Georgia, accounts for approximately 10% of the area’s total daily water usage, according to The New York Times. Residents are now dealing with water pressure issues caused by sediment buildup and have had to cover mitigation costs out of pocket; they’re also struggling to sell their houses to relocate.
A spokesperson for the company managing Meta’s data centre park told the NYT that the cause of the problems is unknown and that the timing of the water issues coinciding with the facility’s construction could just be a coincidence.
[ndc : c’est moi qui met en italique…]
Companies applying to build new facilities in Newton County are requesting as much as 6 million gallons of water a day, more than the county’s entire daily use. Still, the solution isn’t as straightforward as simply rejecting the requests, as they can bring in millions of dollars in tax revenue. Even trying to regulate data centres is difficult because operators are notoriously poor at disclosing their water and energy usage.
