Meta announced Meta Superintelligence Labs on June 30, 2025, bringing its foundation-model, AI product and research teams under chief AI officer Alexandr Wang. An internal memo published by CNBC outlined a new lab to develop the company’s next generation of models alongside continued work on its existing AI systems.
The announcement followed Wang’s move from Scale AI. On June 12, Scale announced that its founder was joining Meta as part of an agreement that included a new investment giving Meta a minority stake in the company. Scale said Wang would remain on its board.
In the June 30 memo, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described parallel efforts to improve the company’s Llama models and research a new generation of models. He said the research effort aimed to reach the industry’s frontier within roughly a year. That was a development target, rather than an established capability.
Recruitment and departures
Zuckerberg’s memo named recruits from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. It also named former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman to lead AI products and applied research, working with Wang within Meta Superintelligence Labs.
WIRED reported that at least three researchers had resigned from the new AI organization. According to the publication, Avi Verma and Ethan Knight returned to OpenAI after spending less than a month at Meta. Rishabh Agarwal also publicly announced his departure, referring to the frontier-research team as the Superintelligence TBD lab.
Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold told WIRED that an intensive recruiting process would include people deciding to stay in their current jobs rather than start new ones, describing that as normal.
Investment in existing services and new AI models
Meta’s October 29 financial outlook described spending priorities spanning its existing business and new AI development. The company said it expected investments in advertising and engagement initiatives to support revenue growth in 2026, while progress on AI models and products could create revenue opportunities over subsequent years.
Meta forecast 2025 capital expenditures, including principal payments on finance leases, of $70 billion to $72 billion. It said its computing needs had expanded beyond its expectations in the previous quarter and that it planned to add capacity through its own infrastructure and third-party cloud providers.
The company expected the dollar increase in capital expenditures to be larger in 2026 than in 2025. It also forecast faster expense growth in 2026, driven primarily by infrastructure costs, with employee compensation the second-largest contributor.
Separately, Meta said in November that it was committing more than $600 billion in the United States by 2028. That commitment covered AI technology, infrastructure and workforce expansion, including data centers; it was broader than a data-center construction budget.