Mark Zuckerberg bets billions on general intelligence

Mark Zuckerberg said he will buy 350,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs this year alone to train Meta's AI models.

"Meta is building an extremely huge infrastructure to serve the development of artificial intelligence," Mark Zuckerberg , CEO of Meta, said in a video posted on Threads on January 19.

He said the company is building General Intelligence with the goal of making AI tools "available and useful to everyone in everyday life."

CEO Meta Mark Zuckerberg. Ảnh: Reuters

To achieve its goal, Meta will purchase approximately 350,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs this year. The company will own a total of about 600,000 chips, including Nvidia's and some products from other units.

Responding to The Verge later, Zuckerberg continued to mention the number of 600,000 GPUs, confirming that Meta will have this number in reserve until the end of the year. "We are ready to build an AI training system at a scale that may be larger than any other individual company," he emphasized.

Graphics processing units (GPUs) are now sought after products due to their high-speed computing and data processing capabilities - essential for any large language model (LLM). To date, Nvidia GPUs have received the most orders, while other companies such as AMD have also started the race with similar products.

Currently on the market, each Nvidia H100 GPU costs about 30,000-40,000 USD. According to estimates by Business Insider , with the purchase of 350,000 additional H100 models, Meta needs to spend about 10-14 billion USD to build a new system. This means Meta owns GPUs equivalent to 18-24 billion USD by the end of this year.

Zuckerberg's pouring billions into AI takes place in the context that Meta has invested tens of billions of dollars to pursue its ambition of the virtual metaverse. After more than four years of investment, Meta lost nearly 50 billion USD , equivalent to the capitalization of many large companies.

"The two big technology waves are the current AI and the future metaverse," he said during an investor meeting last October. "This is a long-term bet. I can't guarantee I'm right, but the metaverse is where the world is headed."

In the field of generative AI, Meta also has a number of notable products. Last September, the company introduced a "multi-personality" AI chatbot . The chatbot is built using the Llama 2 language model and a text-to-image model called Emu. The product generates text, sound, and images, and has access to real-time information through a partnership with Microsoft's Bing search engine. Recently, the company also released Imagine with Meta AI, which allows creating any image from entered text.

Bao Lam

Mark Zuckerberg 'hides from his wife' to play games 21
Zuckerberg once got angry because he was criticized for his virtual universe avatar
Meta was accused of turning a blind eye to harmful content 27
How Zuckerberg ignores harmful content on Facebook 53