Muse Scale-Up Puts Hypothetical Infrastructure Costs at $84 Billion

A hypothetical scale-up puts infrastructure costs for Meta’s Muse AI agent at $84 billion for three billion users, a scenario that highlights cost uncertainty around the company’s expansion plans. Meta introduced Muse on Sept. 8 as a personal AI agent designed to work across apps and websites.

The calculation begins with an estimate of $2.8 billion in infrastructure for 100 million users, alongside requirements of 65,000 CPUs and 75 petabytes of DRAM. Multiplying the cost by 30 yields $84 billion. The three billion-user figure is a scenario input, not a stated Muse target. The estimate provides no cost period or workload assumptions, so it does not establish whether $84 billion represents a one-time buildout, recurring costs or another measure.

The Muse adoption figures provide a nearer-term reference point. As of Oct. 21, more than 10 million people in the U.S. and Canada had set up Muse in about six weeks. About 25% of people who had set it up used it on any given day. Meta is building capacity to serve more than one billion people over the next few years.

Meta has not shared specific Muse cost figures. The company expects serving costs to rise as usage grows and aims to improve compute cost efficiency by more than 10-fold over the next year. Its stated methods include using off-peak capacity, more efficient models and inference optimization.

Muse is free for most users. Meta plans to generate revenue through fees on transactions it facilitates for businesses and subscriptions for advanced models, extra tokens and business features. Advertising brought in $63.061 billion of Meta’s $64.601 billion in revenue for the quarter ended Sept. 30.

Meta forecast 2026 capital expenditures of $135 billion to $145 billion, a company-wide outlook that includes principal payments on finance leases. It recorded $34.91 billion in third-quarter capital expenditures. Those company-wide figures and the $84 billion scenario have different scopes, and the estimate does not specify a time period for direct comparison.