01:21 PM EST, 01/24/2025 (MT Newswires) -- Meta Platforms ( META ) plans to invest $60 billion to $65 billion in capital expenditures in 2025 as the social media giant looks to expand its artificial intelligence infrastructure, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said Friday.

In October, the Facebook and Instagram parent projected 2024 capex in a range of $38 billion to $40 billion and said it continued to expect "significant" capital spending growth in 2025.

In a Friday post on Facebook, Zuckerberg called 2025 a "defining year" for AI. "I expect Meta AI will be the leading assistant serving more than 1 billion people," while Llama 4 will likely become a "leading state-of-the-art" large language model, he wrote.

Meta aims to bring approximately 1 gigawatt of computing power online in 2025 and end the year with more than 1.3 million graphics processing units, according to Zuckerberg. "Meta is building a (2GW-plus) datacenter that is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan," New York, he said.

The company's shares were up 2% in Friday afternoon trade.

Earlier this week, Japan's SoftBank and Microsoft ( MSFT ) -backed OpenAI announced a new company called Stargate that plans to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the US. OpenAI is the parent of generative AI chatbot ChatGPT.

SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle (ORCL) and MGX are the initial equity funders in Stargate, while Arm (ARM), Microsoft ( MSFT ), Nvidia ( NVDA ) , Oracle and OpenAI will be the key initial technology partners, OpenAI and SoftBank said at the time.

Earlier this month, Microsoft ( MSFT ) said it planned to invest about $80 billion in fiscal 2025 to build out datacenters to train AI models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications globally. More than 50% of that investment will be in the US.

"We have the capital to continue investing in the years ahead," Zuckerberg said Friday. "This is a massive effort, and over the coming years it will drive our core products and business."

Meta is scheduled to report fourth-quarter results Wednesday. Analysts polled by FactSet are looking for GAAP earnings of $6.75 a share on sales of $46.97 billion.

Price: 649.67, Change: +13.21, Percent Change: +2.08