Zuckerberg: Meta’s AI-training cluster is bigger than Musk’s

Meta is plowing full speed ahead on AI, and plans to spend a quarter’s worth of revenue on building out its infrastructure for the technology. 

In a call announcing Meta’s Q3 earnings, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company’s next AI model, Llama 4, is currently being trained on a massive supercomputer cluster larger than Elon Musk’s xAI cluster of 100,000 H100 Nvidia GPUs. 

“We’re training the Llama 4 models on a cluster that is bigger than 100K H100s or bigger than anything that I’ve seen reported for what others are doing,” said Zuckerberg in the earnings call. 

Companies and (and governments) have been hoarding the popular Nvidia H100 GPU to train ever-larger AI models. 

Zuckerberg said the smaller versions of the new Llama 4 model should be released early next year, and that the company is working to get the current versions of Llama into the hands of government agencies. “We’re working with enterprises to make it easier to use, and now we’re also working with the public sector to adopt Llama across the US government,” Zuckerberg said in the earnings call. 

Meta says it will spend more on capital expenditures as it continues to scale its investment in AI, expecting to spend between $38 billion and $40 billion, an increase from last quarter’s estimate of $37 billion to $40 billion. That amount is about the size of the company’s overall revenue for the quarter, which grew 19% to $40.6 billion.

Despite reportedly laying off employees for their misuse of $25 meal vouchers, Meta’s headcount has increased 9% year over year to 72,404 workers.

Reality Labs is the division responsible for the ultra-thick augmented reality glasses code-named Orion, as well as its Meta Quest VR headsets. Meta continues to expect 2024 operating losses for the unit “due to our ongoing product development efforts and investments to further scale our ecosystem,” according to the earnings release. The division lost $4.4 billion this quarter. 

Meta said that its generative AI tools are already being used by more than 1 million advertisers to create 15 million ads, which have led to an increase in ad performance. 

Zuckerberg also announced that the social-media platform Threads — launched after Elon Musk purchased Twitter — is growing fast, signing up 1 million users per day, and now has a total of 275 million users.

“I’m pretty amped about all the work we’re doing right now. This may be the most dynamic moment that I’ve seen in our industry, and I’m focused on making sure that we build some awesome things and make the most of the opportunities ahead,” Zuckerberg said.