Meta Attempts to Build Frontier AI Models
The world's largest social media company has the funds to build vast data centers and hire world-class talent. Mark Zuckerberg's goals in artificial intelligence are however distinct.
With annual profits of over $80 billion, Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) is the seventh-most profitable company in the world and the eighth-most valuable with a market capitalization of over $1.5 trillion (META).1 Meta earns these profits from just under $200 billion in annual online advertising revenues from its globally dominant social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. As of December 2025, Meta claimed 3.58 billion daily active users across its social media platforms.2 This is roughly 45% of the entire human population. Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made it a goal for the company to produce frontier artificial intelligence models at the cutting edge of capabilities, competitive with AI labs like OpenAI or Anthropic. With AI capabilities premised to a large extent on access to enough computing power or “compute” from advanced semiconductors from companies like Nvidia, Meta’s financial firepower makes it a key contender to examine in the AI race.