ontinuing its quest for power, Meta on Monday announced an initiative that aims to build out ten more gigawatts of compute “this decade.” 

Beyond the first decade, the initiative, titled “Meta Compute,” aims to establish “hundreds of gigawatts or more over time,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement posted to Facebook. The move closely follows Meta inking several deals with nuclear companies to give it access to 6.6 more gigawatts of power by 2035. 

“How we engineer, invest, and partner to build this infrastructure will become a strategic advantage,” Zuckerberg said in the post.

Meta’s moves fit into a broader wave of multi-billion dollar data center deals over the past several months, as major companies push to build out the infrastructure they need for their lofty ambitions of AI transformation to take hold.

Because traditional data centers weren’t designed for the AI era, these firms are rushing to figure out how to rewrite the “infrastructure playbook” in real time, Anuj Bahal, global lead account partner at KPMG, told The Deep View. Power, however, is the real struggle, he said. “If you can't secure power and permits, your returns are theoretical.”

But Meta’s frenzy for AI factories and energy might not be about making a model that’s better than that of OpenAI and Google, Thomas Randall, a research director at Info-Tech Research Group, told The Deep View.

Instead, the company may see these resources as a “strategic currency,” he said. “The company seems to be looking to control the resources that are necessary to build AI models and to operate them.”

Additionally, Meta could pull an Oracle and provide its excess resources to customers building AI applications, Randall said. “The level of investment they are making indicates that Meta is considering offering their services to external customers beyond what they are using internally,” he told me.