Zuckerberg says Meta will build a data center the size of Manhattan in AI push

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/16/zuckerberg-meta-data-center-ai-manhattan

by c420 • 1 year ago

27 34 1 year ago

For a single, square building, this area would be about 5 miles on a side. That's ridiculous, and you'd have a hard time getting rid of the heat

If you're putting up fences, include no-go zones, curvy roads with check points and bollards, etc etc to protect a number of large but not absurdly large buildings, maybe. Still seems on the big size.

dskhatri• 1 year ago

Some of the graphics indicate a contiguous building but it makes no sense to be constructed that way. The footprint probably includes power generation, power conversion, cooling systems, and compute centers as distinct blocks/buildings within the site.

quickthrowman• 1 year ago

It likely won’t be a single building the size of Manhattan, Facebook doesn’t build their data centers like that now.

Each Facebook data center has multiple buildings on each site, at least at the three sites I am familiar with.

joules77• 1 year ago

He has to go on signaling to attract people (at this stage its mostly opportunists having a field day).

Melatonic• 1 year ago

Lot of eggs to put in one basket. What happens if there is some type of natural disaster in the area?

quantified• 1 year ago

The title is pure clickbait, Zuck didn't say that. "A significant part of the footprint" could be 2%.

tootie• 1 year ago

https://www.threads.com/@zuck/post/DMF6tMAxkX8

He has a little animation of the building overlayed on Manhattan. Looks like it would cover maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of the land.

krunck• 1 year ago

But, Oh the replies!

xg152• 1 year ago

According to that animation, it would also be taller than the Empire State Building across the entire area.

lisbbb• 1 year ago

If AI crap needs that much footprint I'm pretty sure it's just not worth it.

Tarsul• 1 year ago

problem is that Big Tech has the money and wants to spend it. Maybe only a downturn can stop (or slow) this.

dmitrygr• 1 year ago

How many elephants will it weigh? How many times faster than a cheetah will it be?

cosmicgadget• 1 year ago

What is the compute power in metaflops???

seydor• 1 year ago

i m not sure it's a good investment. As soon as ASI is invented, it will make the investment obsolete. Maybe i should sell my Meta stock.

I find it ridiculous to think that we will be able to exploit ASI for our benefit. It's like a bunch of ants plotting to enslave and exploit humans.

Also Elon is smarter - he s spending Saudi money instead of his own

rsynnott• 1 year ago

while another, called Hyperion, will be able to scale up to 5 gigawatts over the coming years, Zuckerberg said.

Someone hasn't read the Dan Simmons novel, it seems. Well, one would hope, anyway.

IvyMike• 1 year ago

From the classic tweet[0]:

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus

[0] https://x.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538?lang=e...

AlwaysRock• 1 year ago

Palantir Technologies is named after the "palantír" from Lord of the Rings. Famously, a well-used and safe technology.

BoredPositron3• 1 year ago

Zuck is so reactive in everything and even as last mover he always misses. Would make me icky working for meta.

JumpCrisscross2• 1 year ago

even as last mover he always misses

Instagram. WhatsApp.

BoredPositron3• 1 year ago

Talking about original ideas/ip.

gorjusborg• 1 year ago

He renamed his company Meta, as in metaverse.

I understand you are responding to the 'always', but can we agree that at least his level of confidence in an idea isn't a great indicator?

xg152• 1 year ago

He bought those after they were already big. He can claim Facebook obviously, but not much else.

beAbU• 1 year ago

He bought those, they were not built by meta.

moneycantbuy• 1 year ago

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44562052

basically zuck destroys the surrounding neighborhood without consequence.

londons_explore• 1 year ago

There is only a fixed amount of silicon production capacity. That can't be scaled up quickly.

Powering all produced chips 24x7 is therefore the maximum energy use.

I suspect these huge AI datacenter proposals are bigger than that - and therefore either aren't going to happen, or will be delayed many years.

MichaelRazum• 1 year ago

Grok4 was trained on 100k or 200k GPUs (as far as I understand)

Grok5 might need 1MM or 2MM.

So the question is what about metas / zucks plans? How many GPUs will Manhattan get? Looks like, that to get the next unlock you need crazy amounts of compute.

jiggawatts• 1 year ago

Meta had the equivalent of about 600K H100 cards a year ago, but they were geographically distributed and used mostly for inference.

These giant data centres will allow these companies to put about a million in one location and possibly into a single giant training cluster.

syeare• 1 year ago

Better make your own powerplant Unsurprising if they steal from the same source as taxpayers' electricity, get subsidized for it because "jobs" (that no one gets), finally resulting in raised bills for the rest

Zuckerberg says Meta will build a data center the size of Manhattan in AI push

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