New Delhi, Jan. 13 -- As artificial intelligence models grow larger, more energy-hungry, and harder to scale, the competitive edge is shifting away from algorithms alone. Increasingly, it is about who controls compute at scale. Meta's latest announcement makes that shift explicit.

On January 13, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Meta Compute, a top-level initiative designed to build the large-scale computing infrastructure that will underpin the company's long-term AI ambitions. The plan is unapologetically ambitious: Meta intends to build "tens of gigawatts" of computing capacity this decade, with the potential to scale to "hundreds of gigawatts or more over time."

In Zuckerberg's framing, infrastructure is no longer a backend function. It is s...