It’s Official Zuck is Building Skynet and Calling it a Data Center (Bold Move with Bigger Risks)

I’m not saying Mark Zuckerberg is plotting world domination… but the man’s out here breaking ground on a five-gigawatt monument to machine learning in Louisiana, and I’m starting to feel like I’ve seen this movie before. Spoiler alert: it usually ends with someone melting in a nuclear blast while clutching a chain-link fence. 

(Source: Giphy) 

In short, Zuck’s new temple is called Hyperion, and it’s slated to suck up enough juice to power four million homes. Instead, it’ll feed rows of AI clusters training models to generate cat memes, stock predictions, and probably your next therapist. It’s a chunk of compute the size of Manhattan, which is fitting, because the man’s got Manhattan-sized ambitions and the social skills of Sheldon Cooper. 

(Source: Tech Crunch) 

Meanwhile, there’s another facility called Prometheus popping up in Ohio next year, because if you’re gonna play god, might as well name your data centers after the guy who stole fire from Olympus and got his liver eaten daily for his trouble. One gigawatt for Prometheus alone (which, for those asking, is a metric f*k ton of energy). The cost for both projects? Somewhere along the line of “hundreds of billions of dollars” per sources. 

Now, I don’t know about you… but even though Meta’s ad business is good, it’s not “I’ll casually burn half a trillion bucks” good. Especially since they’re on that trajectory with the massive disappointment that is Reality Labs. Meaning, the bigger gamble is that the next wave of AI models are as profitable as Zuck hopes. If they flop… or regulators grab giant AI models by the balls… Meta’s stuck with a Manhattan-sized monument with sunk costs.

(Source: Giphy) 

However, even while Zuck is busy playing Doc Brown, Meta’s stock continues to keep climbing because Wall Street is in heat for anything labeled “AI,” and they’re convinced that whoever owns the biggest GPU army gets to print the money. And I can’t say they’re wrong. Compute is the moat now. Zuck’s basically digging the Mariana Trench with Nvidia shovels while OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic look over the fence, muttering about model alignment and hoping they don’t get wedgied out of the picture. 

On the other hand, all this silicon has to eat. Hyperion and Prometheus together will slurp up an ungodly amount of power. Five gigawatts could keep four million homes running for a year. Instead, it’s going into racks of GPUs screaming through terabytes of data so your next AI chatbot can “sound more human.” The local consequences are already showing. A smaller Meta data center in Georgia allegedly drained so much water that residents’ taps ran dry. And experts warn data centers might devour 20% of the U.S. grid by 2030, up from 2.5% in 2022.

(Source: New York Times) 

And yet, Energy Secretary Chris Wright is singing the tune about how AI will transform electricity into “the most valuable output imaginable: intelligence.” Which is great until Louisiana melts down every summer because all the juice is going into training models off of Reddit’s cesspool. 

In the end, the bet is this: if Meta nails it, they become indispensable AI geniuses (with the superintelligence team becoming less of a joke and more of a legendary move). If they miss, they’ve spent enough cash to finance a small country for a generation… and possibly torched America’s power grid for nothing. Now it probably won’t get that catastrophic, but the chance is there. 

(Source: Giphy) 

So while huge props go out to Zuck for thinking big… It's not without its risks. Both with cash and logistics. Now obviously, there’s still quite a bit more details that are left to be aired out on this move, but for now, keep your eyes on Meta shares as we approach this morning’s opening bell and place your bets accordingly. Until next time, friends… 

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News holds positions in Google and Meta as mentioned in the article.