Zuckerberg spent years building on Apple’s terms. His $100 billion-plus AI bet is about owning everything

Mark Zuckerberg says he knew he was taking an enormous risk when he greenlit Meta’s AI buildout—a commitment he pegged at as much as $200 billion—before there was any proof it would work.

“We’re going to write this check for, like, I don’t know, like $100 billion, $200 billion,” Zuckerberg said on a recent episode of Cheeky Pint , the podcast hosted by Stripe cofounder John Collison.

“I’m like, ‘Alex, are you sure this is going to work?’” Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer, appeared alongside Zuckerberg and said decisions of that size get made “long before there’s proof points around whether or not even the thing is working.” He added: “It’s like the opposite of Lean Startup.” The episode was released Oct.

12, the same day Meta launched Muse Wonder , the first frontier-class model from the superintelligence lab Wang leads .

Meta has guided for as much as $145 billion in capital expenditures this year , much of it on AI infrastructure.

Much of that money is going toward what Zuckerberg describes as a “full-stack” operation.

“Meta is a full-stack tech company,” he said.

“We build our own data centers, we build our own chips, we build our own low-level infrastructure.” Lessons from the smartphone wars Zuckerberg’s push to own the full stack may stem from his nearly two-decade rivalry with Apple and Google, which control the world’s dominant smartphone platforms.

Facebook’s iPhone app launched in July 2008, followed by an Android app in September 2009 .

Its mobile years that followed were marked by friction with the platform owners, some of it self-inflicted.

Zuckerberg repeatedly sought workarounds to the limits those platforms imposed.

In 2013, Facebook pushed updates to its Android app outside the Google Play store, prompting Google to ban the practice .

In 2019, Apple shut down a Facebook “Research” app that paid users, including teens, up to $20 a month for sweeping access to their phone data.

The biggest blow came in 2021, when Apple began letting iPhone users block apps from tracking them —a change Meta later said would cost it about $10 billion in 2022 alone.