Meta is to build an AI data centre in the US which is almost the size of Manhattan.

Manhattan in New York covers an area of around 59 square kilometres or 23 square miles.

The social media company’s founder Mark Zuckerberg said Meta will spend “hundreds of billions” on the data centre, which is expected to go live in 2026.

Writing on the social media platform threads, Zuckerberg said the New Albany, Ohio-based data centre will be called Prometheus and will be the first of several multi-gigawatt (GW) clusters.

The second, called Hyperion, will be able to scale up to five (GW) over several years.
Zuckerberg added the company is building “multiple” titan clusters.

Hyperion will be built in Louisiana, with the site expected to go live from 2030.

Zuckerberg said the names reflected the scale and impact they will have.

Zuckerberg added the data centres will form part of the company’s “superintelligence effort” which involves putting together the “most elite and talent-dense" team in the industry.

“Meta Superintelligence Labs will have industry-leading levels of compute and by far the greatest compute per researcher,” Zuckerberg said. “I'm looking forward to working with the top researchers to advance the frontier!”

Last month, news emerged that Zuckerberg is putting together a new team focused on the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

AGI is a theoretical system that can match or even surpass the capabilities of a human being.

According to Bloomberg, Zuckerberg is personally recruiting about 50 experts, including a new head of AI research, to lead the “superintelligence” team.

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