Meta announces Prometheus: a 1-gigawatt AI supercluster racing Stargate to come online in 2026
Jul 14, 2025
Key Points
- Meta's superintelligence lab will invest hundreds of billions in capex to build Prometheus, a 1-gigawatt supercluster due online in 2026, beating OpenAI and SoftBank's Stargate.
- Meta plans to scale its Hyperion facility to 5 gigawatts over three to four years, a historically unprecedented buildout that falls short of the 10x annual growth some AI evangelists project.
- Meta's superintelligence lab is considering abandoning Llama, its open-source flagship model, in favor of closed development—a philosophical reversal from years of positioning itself as the open-source champion.
Summary
Meta is racing to build the largest AI supercluster ever constructed. Mark Zuckerberg announced on Threads and Facebook that his newly formed superintelligence lab is real and will invest hundreds of billions in capital expenditure over the coming years. Meta's current capex runs $37–38 billion annually, with plans to sustain or exceed that pace.
Prometheus, a 1-gigawatt supercluster, is scheduled to come online in 2026. Zuckerberg claims Meta will finish Prometheus before OpenAI and SoftBank's Stargate project. Beyond that, Meta is building Hyperion, which will scale to 5 gigawatts over several years, roughly a 5x increase in capacity over three to four years.
The scale is extraordinary. Zuckerberg visualized Hyperion as occupying the footprint of Manhattan. Yet this ambition sits in tension with the rhetoric of AI acceleration evangelists, who routinely project 10x capacity growth annually. Meta's 5x over multiple years is massively capital-intensive and historically unprecedented, but falls short of the exponential curves some in the field claim are necessary.
Strategy shift on open source
New York Times reporting by Eli Tan surfaces a potentially major philosophical change. Meta's newly formed superintelligence lab has discussed abandoning Llama, its open-source flagship model, in favor of a closed model. For years, Meta has positioned itself as the open-source champion. Executive Yann LeCun has argued the winning platform will be the open one. A move to closed development would represent both a technical and philosophical reversal, though the reporting notes discussions are still in flux and no final decision has been made.
Zuckerberg's naming choices—Prometheus for the first supercluster, Orion for his AR headset—suggest a pattern of embracing mythologically loaded names associated with hubris and ambition.