Meta to Spend up to $27b on Nebius AI Infrastructure

Meta Platforms is planning to spend up to $27 billion on artificial intelligence infrastructure from cloud provider Nebius, highlighting the enormous computing demand required to power the next generation of AI systems.

The deal, which could run for five years, will give Meta access to massive computing capacity needed to train and run advanced AI models used across its platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. 

Under the agreement, Nebius will provide about $12 billion worth of dedicated AI computing capacity starting in early 2027, with Meta committing to purchase up to $15 billion more in additional capacity from future data-centre clusters being built by the company. 

Combined, the arrangement could reach a total contract value of around $27 billion, making it one of Meta’s largest infrastructure agreements to date.

The partnership reflects the massive investments technology companies are making to secure computing resources for artificial intelligence.

Modern AI models require huge amounts of processing power to train and operate. These workloads are typically handled in specialised AI data centres, which use advanced GPUs and high-performance networking to process large datasets efficiently. 

Meta has been aggressively expanding its AI capabilities in recent years as it competes with companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic in the race to develop powerful generative AI systems.

The company has already integrated AI into its advertising tools, recommendation algorithms, and messaging products, while also developing its own large language models.

Nebius operates what is sometimes called a “neocloud” a cloud infrastructure provider specifically optimised for AI workloads.

The infrastructure that Meta will access through the agreement is expected to be powered by Nvidia’s next-generation AI computing platforms, which are designed to handle the massive parallel processing required for training and running large AI models. 

The cloud provider has also received significant investment to scale its AI infrastructure, including billions of dollars in funding tied to expanding global data-centre capacity.

Meta’s agreement with Nebius reflects a broader trend across the technology industry.

Major tech companies including Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta are collectively expected to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on AI infrastructure in the coming years as demand for computing power continues to surge. 

Much of this spending is focused on building large AI data centres capable of training increasingly powerful models and supporting AI services used by millions of people worldwide.

For Meta, securing long-term computing capacity is becoming a critical priority as the company attempts to scale its AI ambitions and compete with the industry’s leading AI developers.

The Nebius deal signals just how expensive the race to build the future of artificial intelligence is becoming and how central computing infrastructure has become to the global AI competition.