Zuck shrugs off DeepSeek, vows to spend hundreds of billions on AI

U.S. markets panicked on Monday over speculation that DeepSeek’s AI models would crush demand for GPUs, with Nvidia’s stock dropping almost 20%.

But Meta isn’t backing off, with its CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledging that the tech giant would invest “very heavily” in AI — even “hundreds of billions of dollars” — over the long term, he said during Meta’s first-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.

Zuckerberg already announced last week that Meta would spend more than $60 billion in 2025 alone on capital expenditures, primarily on data centers.

In response to an analyst’s question about DeepSeek’s impact on Meta’s AI spending, Zuckerberg said spending heavily on AI infrastructure will continue to be a “strategic advantage” for Meta. 

Meta considers DeepSeek a new competitor and is learning from it, but it’s “way too early” to tell if demand for chips will stop increasing as they remain crucial for inference purposes, Zuckerberg said, noting that Meta has billions of users.

“At this point, I would bet that the ability to build out that kind of infrastructure is going to be a major advantage for both the quality of the service and being able to serve the scale that we want to,” Zuckerberg said.

Meta’s goal with its next model, Llama 4, is to make it the world’s most competitive, even compared to closed models (like ChatGPT), Zuckerberg said. He added that he expects it to have agentic capabilities — something both OpenAI and Anthropic have moved into — along with multimodal ones.

“Our goal with Llama 3 was to make open source competitive with closed models,” he said. “And our goal for Llama 4 is to lead.”

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