Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has expressed confidence in his company’s AI investment plans despite China’s DeepSeek AI models’ recent innovations. Despite acknowledging the potential benefits of rival companies, Zuckerberg believes investing heavily in capital expenditures and infrastructure will be a strategic advantage for Meta over time.
The company reaffirmed its plan to spend between $60 billion and $65 billion on capital expenditures this year, up from $39 billion in 2024. This investment is crucial for building expensive data centers necessary to power new AI services, including a highly intelligent and personalized assistant.
Zuckerberg cited the advent of generative AI as an arms race among tech companies like Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet. However, he noted that while OpenAI’s ChatGPT has spurred this competition, Meta will continue to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure.
The CEO mentioned that DeepSeek’s new AI models have “novel” innovations that Meta hopes to emulate. He also highlighted the benefits of open-source AI technologies and believes that an American standard is crucial for national advantage.
Meta’s Q4 earnings call reported strong financial results, with revenue up 21% year over year and net income exceeding expectations. Despite this, Zuckerberg remains committed to investing heavily in AI infrastructure, citing that it’s too early to have a strong opinion on changes in advanced AI model training and deployment methods.
Source: https://fortune.com/2025/01/29/mark-zuckerberg-deepseek-us-ai-global-open-source-standard-hundreds-billions-capex-meta-earnings