Managing such a gigantic array of chips to develop Llama 4 is likely to present unique engineering challenges and require large amounts of energy. On Wednesday, Meta executives dodged an analyst question about energy access limitations in parts of the U.S. that have hampered companies’ efforts to develop more powerful AI.
According an estimatea cluster of 100,000 H100 chips would require 150 megawatts of power. The largest national laboratory supercomputer in the United States, The Captainon the contrary, it requires 30 megawatts of power. Meta expects to spend up to $40 billion in capital this year to equip data centers and other infrastructure, an increase of more than 42 percent from 2023. The company expects even steeper growth in that spending next year.
Meta’s total operating costs have grown about 9 percent this year. But overall sales (largely from advertising) have increased more than 22 percent, leaving the company with wider margins and higher profits even as it invests billions of dollars in Llama’s efforts.
Meanwhile, OpenAI, considered the current leader in developing cutting-edge AI, is burning money despite charging developers for access to its models. What remains a nonprofit company for now has said it is training GPT-5, a successor to the model currently powering ChatGPT. OpenAI has said that GPT-5 will be larger than its predecessor, but has not said anything about the group of computers it is using for training. OpenAI has also said that in addition to scaling, GPT-5 will incorporate other innovations, including a recently developed reasoning approach.
Sam Altman, CEO has said that GPT-5 will represent “a significant leap forward” compared to its predecessor. Last week, Altman responded to a news report that said OpenAI’s next frontier model would launch in December. writing in X, “fake news out of control.”
On Tuesday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the newest version of the company’s Gemini family of generative AI models is in development.
Meta’s open approach to AI has sometimes proven controversial. Some AI experts worry that making much more powerful AI models freely available could be dangerous because they could help criminals launch cyberattacks or automate the design of chemical or biological weapons. Although Llama is tuned before release to restrict bad behavior, it is relatively trivial to remove these restrictions.
Zuckerberg remains optimistic about the open source strategy, even as Google and OpenAI push proprietary systems. “It seems pretty clear to me that open source will be the most cost-effective, customizable, reliable, efficient and user-friendly option available to developers,” he said Wednesday. “And I’m proud that Llama is leading the way on this.”
Zuckerberg added that Llama 4’s new capabilities should be able to drive a broader range of features across meta-services. Today, the exclusive offering based on the Llama models is the ChatGPT-type chatbot known as Meta AI that is available on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other applications.
More than 500 million people use Meta AI monthly, Zuckerberg said. Over time, Meta hopes to generate revenue through ads in the feature. “There will be a broader and broader set of queries that people will use it for, and monetization opportunities will exist over time as we get there,” Meta CFO Susan Li said on Wednesday’s call. With the potential for advertising revenue, Meta could manage to subsidize Llama for everyone else.