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Meta may not currently lead the race for AI superintelligence, but it’s drawing heavily on its cash reserves to pursue the technology. Founder Mark Zuckerberg announced Monday that the company will spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build several enormous AI data centers. The first of these centersexpected to be online next yearis called “Prometheus.” Zuckerberg says it will be capable of generating one gigawatt of energy. But Meta isn’t stopping there. “We’re also building Hyperion, which will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years. We’re building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan,” he wrote on Facebook. (A Meta spokesperson tells Fast Company Hyperion is currently under construction in Louisiana, while the Prometheus project is an expansion to a data center campus in Ohio.) Five gigawatts is roughly equal to the total energy consumption of Miami and equivalent to the output of five nuclear reactorsenough to power about 3.5 million homes for a year. There’s a certain irony in naming the center Prometheus. In Greek mythology, Prometheus defied the gods by stealing fire from Olympus. Meta, meanwhile, has been aggressively poaching top AI talent from rivals, offering multi-million-dollar salaries that far exceed what competitors pay. Zuckerberg is reportedly overseeing those recruitment efforts himself. With data centers of this scale, he could further strengthen the companys hiring appeal. Meta has also acquired a 49% stake in Scale AI, bringing its CEO, Alexandr Wang, on board. Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub, has also joined Meta. Daniel Grossthe CEO and co-founder of Safe Superintelligence, which he launched with OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever last Juneis now part of the company as well. With this wave of infrastructure announcements, Zuckerberg is signaling Metas intent to outpace OpenAI and other artificial intelligence initiatives. This comes after the company’s Llama 4 model underperformed following several high-profile staff departures. In response, Meta reorganized its AI division and renamed it Superintelligence Labs. And Meta certainly has the funds to support this push. In April, it raised its expected capital expenditure to as high as $72 billion. On Monday, Metas stock rose just under 1% to $724 per share. The company currently has a market capitalization of $1.82 trillionvastly higher than OpenAIs $300 billion valuation. But the competition isn’t sitting by either. OpenAI is building a five-gigawatt data center of its own, called Stargate. Announced in January, the company said it would invest $500 billion over four years to build the facility, with support from Oracle, SoftBank, and MGX. OpenAI committed to deploying $100 billion immediately. Texas has been designated as the flagship location for the data centers, with the first site expected to begin operations later this year in Abilene. “This project will not only support the re-industrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post. Alphabet, meanwhile, is spending $3.3 billion on two new data centers in South Carolina. One issue Meta did not address: the environmental impact of these massive data centers. A scientific paper published last year on Cornell Universitys preprint server arXiv (titled “The Unpaid Toll: Quantifying the Public Health Impact of AI”) estimated that pollution from AI data centers could cause up to 1,300 premature deaths annually by 2030. It also estimated that public health costs related to their air pollution are already at $20 billion per year. By 2030, the researchers forecast, the public health burden from AI data centers will be twice that of the U.S. steel industry, and could rival emissions from all the cars, buses, and trucks in California. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has dismantled dozens of climate programs in its first 100-plus days. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is also considering overturning previous findings that classify greenhouse gas pollution as harmfulpotentially weakening its ability to regulate carbon emissions.
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Debate over the so-called Gen Z stare is the latest conversation on TikTok to capture people’s attention, but like so many viral social media moments, generations from millennials to boomers have a very different take on things. Here’s what to know about the Gen Z stare and the debate surrounding it. What is the Gen Z stare? First off, you’re probably wondering, what is this Gen Z stare? Simply put, it’s a blank, unfocused stare into the void, often found in the faces of Gen Z (also called zoomers)the generation born between 1997 and 2012, wedged in between millennials and Generation Alpha. It’s most irritating for older people, namely millennials and their parents, who find it difficult to hold a conversation with members of Gen Z, instead being met with a blank, unfocused stare, often accompanied by silence or a one word answer. Why are people debating over the Gen Z stare? If the Gen Z stare seems like typical teenage behavior, you’re not wrong; Gen Z certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on being uncommunicative. Now, TikTokers are debating not only whether the Gen Z stare exists and is a thing, but also, what it all means. Is it rude, or a justifiable reaction to what is being said? In their defense, Gen Z social media users have said the stare is one of disbelief or frustration. It might be justified when, for example, in a customer service job, an older person can’t figure out how to use the credit card machine, or just has trouble using basic technologybest summed up by TikToker _kayluhbb, whose post garnered 1.1 million likes and a number of replies, like this one: “The gen Z stare is bc youre tired or repeating yourself.” There are plenty of other TikTok posts demonstrating the stare, including this one, in which the user acts out a scenario in which she has to repeatedly tell a customer that a class is fully booked. Fair enough. But older generations used to just call this type of frustration being impatient, or mocking someone. Just sayin’. However, not to be out-mocked, millennials are poking fun back at Gen Z, like in this post from a TikToker named Riley, who was met with a Gen Z stare as she attempts and fails to get her daughter golf lessons. Which is, at the very least, cringe.
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Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday that Meta Platforms would spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build several massive AI data centers for superintelligence, intensifying his pursuit of a technology he has chased with a talent war for top engineers. The social media giant is among the large tech companies that have struck high-profile deals and doled out multi-million-dollar pay packages in recent months to fast-track work on machines that could outthink humans on many tasks. Its first multi-gigawatt data center, dubbed Prometheus, is expected to come online in 2026, while another, called Hyperion, will be able to scale up to 5 gigawatts over the coming years, Zuckerberg said in a post on his Threads social media platform. “We’re building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan,” the billionaire CEO said. He also pointed to a report from industry publication SemiAnalysis that Meta was on track to be the first AI lab to bring a gigawatt-plus supercluster online. Zuckerberg touted the strength in the company’s core advertising business to justify the massive spending amid investor concerns on whether the expenditure would pay off. “We have the capital from our business to do this,” he said. Meta shares were trading 1% higher. The stock has risen more than 20% so far this year. The company, which generated nearly $165 billion in revenue last year, reorganized its AI efforts last month under a division called Superintelligence Labs after setbacks for its open-source Llama 4 model and key staff departures. It is betting that the division would generate new cash flows from the Meta AI app, image-to-video ad tools and smart glasses. D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria said Meta was investing aggressively in AI as the technology has already boosted its ad business by allowing it to sell more ads and at higher prices. “But at this scale, the investment is more oriented to the long-term competition to have the leading AI model, which could take time to materialize,” Luria said. In recent weeks, Zuckerberg has personally led an aggressive talent raid for the Meta Superintelligence Labs, which will be led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and ex-GitHub chief Nat Friedman, after Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale. Meta had raised its 2025 capital expenditure to between $64 billion and $72 billion in April, aiming to bolster the company’s position against rivals OpenAI and Google. Jaspreet Singh and Aditya Soni, Reuters
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