Zuckerberg Vows to Spend Billions on AI in the Wake of China's Rise to Prominence

Blink and miss it; the rise of AI is reaching historically epic proportions. It's going to take a lot to stay ahead of the pack. No one knows this more than Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, who is ready to invest "very heavily" in AI  — even “hundreds of billions of dollars” — over the long term, he said during Meta’s first-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.

Last week, Zuckerberg announced that Meta would spend over $60 billion in 2025 alone on capital expenditures, primarily data centers. When questioned by an analyst about DeepSeek’s impact on Meta’s AI spending, Zuckerberg said spending heavily on AI infrastructure will continue to be a “strategic advantage” for Meta. 

For Meta, DeepSeek is a new competitor much like others, and is learning from it. However, it's still early days to tell if demand for chips will stop increasing as they remain crucial for inference purposes, Zuckerberg said, noting that Meta has billions of users. “At this point, I would bet that the ability to build out that kind of infrastructure is going to be a major advantage for both the quality of the service and being able to serve the scale that we want to,” Zuckerberg said.

The primary target for Meta is its next model, the Llama 4. It aims to make it the world’s most competitive, even compared to closed models like ChatGPT. Zuckerberg expects it to have agentic capabilities — something both OpenAI and Anthropic have moved into — along with multimodal ones.

“Our goal with Llama 3 was to make open source competitive with closed models,” he said. “And our goal for Llama 4 is to lead.” With various apps and AI models taking a beating from DeepSeek, the world waits with bated breath to see how the story develops.