Meta Platforms is undergoing a fundamental transformation, evolving beyond its identity as a social media giant into a strategic force in the global AI infrastructure landscape. Driven by the generative AI boom, the company is positioning itself not as a traditional cloud provider like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud, but as a critical enabler of sovereign AI—systems tailored to meet national security, data sovereignty, and economic independence needs. Meta’s ambition centers on building massive AI compute capacity—tens of gigawatts in the near term, hundreds in the long term—requiring investments in the hundreds of billions of dollars. To achieve this, the company has launched Meta Compute, a new strategic initiative aimed at forming deep partnerships with national governments, sovereign wealth funds, and private capital groups. This effort is designed to secure funding, regulatory alignment, and political legitimacy, allowing Meta to deploy infrastructure without directly competing with hyperscalers in the IaaS space. Mark Zuckerberg has framed this as a mission to deliver “personal superintelligence to billions,” emphasizing that how Meta engineers, invests in, and partners on infrastructure will be a core strategic advantage. The initiative reflects a shift from pure software and social networking to a hybrid model where Meta acts as a platform for AI deployment—offering compute, storage, and networking—while relying on sovereign partnerships to navigate geopolitical and regulatory complexities. The company’s recent $14.8 billion investment in Scale AI, which included bringing on its CEO Alexandr Wang as Meta’s Chief AI Officer, signals a move toward integrating high-quality data pipelines and enterprise-ready AI tools into its ecosystem. Scale AI’s expertise in data labeling and model preparation is critical for making open-source models like Llama and proprietary ones from Anthropic usable at scale—especially for government and enterprise clients. To manage these complex international engagements, Meta has appointed Dina Powell McCormick as President and Vice Chairman. Her extensive experience in government—spanning the Bush and Trump administrations—and her deep ties to global financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs and Saudi Aramco’s IPO, make her uniquely positioned to navigate sovereign partnerships. Her role underscores Meta’s recognition that infrastructure scale requires more than technology—it demands political and financial diplomacy. Internally, Meta is restructuring its technical leadership. Santosh Janardhan continues to lead global infrastructure and engineering, overseeing datacenter operations, software stacks, and silicon development. Meanwhile, Daniel Gross, a veteran of AI startups and investor in companies like Perplexity and CoreWeave, has been tasked with long-term capacity planning and supplier strategy. A key element of Meta’s cost-competitive vision is its push for custom AI silicon. Acquisitions like Rivos, a RISC-V CPU and GPU designer, and ongoing development of MTIA accelerators are part of a broader effort to reduce reliance on Nvidia and AMD. By building its own chips, Meta aims to lower the cost per AI inference and training token—essential for profitability at scale. Ultimately, Meta’s strategy is not to become a cloud provider, but to become the preferred infrastructure partner for nations and institutions seeking AI sovereignty. With Zuckerberg holding 61% of voting shares and a clear vision, the company is betting that its ability to combine massive capital, technical innovation, and geopolitical savvy will allow it to dominate the next phase of AI—where compute is not just power, but power in the hands of nations.