If you’re thinking about investing in the AI space, or just want to keep track of what’s really going on, SemiAnalysis is, I think, the place to read. Here’s their latest, packed full of information and thoughtful conclusions:
https://semianalysis.com/2025/07/11/meta-superintelligence-leadership-compute-talent-and-data/
As you may know, Meta (FaceBook parent) bought a 49% stake in Scale AI for a ~$30B valuation.
Despite seemingly unlimited resources, Meta has been falling behind foundation labs in model performance. The real wake-up call came when Meta lost its lead in open-weight models to DeepSeek. That stirred the sleeping giant. Now in full Founder Mode, Mark Zuckerberg is personally leading Meta’s charge, identifying Meta’s two core shortcomings: Talent and Compute.
As for Talent, Zuck is spending freely, with a “typical offer” being $200M over 4 years. Yeah, not a typo. Any current computer scientist looking to make the big bucks needs to be in the AI space.
On the Compute side, Meta has thrown out it’s previously paintstakingly-crafted data center plans and is now doing whatever they can to scale up quickly at any cost, from using tents, to generating their own electricity from gas, to not worrying about power backup.
While all eyes are on the high-profile Stargate datacenter in Abilene, Meta has been planning a response for over a year and making tremendous progress. The Louisiana cluster is set to be the world’s largest individual campus by the end of 2027, with over 1.5GW of IT power in phase 1. Sources tell us this is internally named Hyperion.
From Llama 3.0 open-sourced dominance to the epic fail of Llama 4 Behemoth, this Titan of AI is down but not out. In fact, we believe Meta’s ramp in training FLOPS will rival even that of OAI. The company is going from GPU-poor to GPU-filthy-rich on a per researcher basis.
There’s also a discussion of the differences in AI application. I don’t think many people understand that it isn’t all about Chatbots. The article points out that Google and Meta have followed what SemiAnalysis calls an “AI Incrementalism” strategy by enhancing existing products with better recommendation systems and GenAI. As such, GenAI acts as an extension to these tech giants’ businesses. They don’t have the same existential need to dominate new use cases like OpenAI in chatbots and Anthropic in coding APIs.
As a result, when measuring GenAI consumer app traction, Meta and Google meaningfully lag [OpenAI’s] ChatGPT in its reach and engagement.
But that’s changing.
There’s also a highly technical explanation of how/why Meta ended up trailing DeepSeek.
At any rate, Meta’s spend is summed up:
Zuck could not have picked a better time start this spending splurge. The One Big Beautfiul Bill has some tax goodies specific to hyperscalers that could massively accelerate the tax incentives to build now and go big. Superintelligence funded by the federal government is the modern Manhattan Project.