Exclusive: Meta to deploy in-house custom chips this year to power AI drive
Facebook owner Meta Platforms plans to deploy into its data centers this year a new version of a custom chip aimed at supporting its artificial intelligence (AI) push.
The chip, a second generation of an in-house silicon line Meta announced last year, could help to reduce Meta's dependence on the Nvidia chips that dominate the market and control the spiraling costs associated with running AI workloads as it races to launch AI products.
The world's biggest social media company has been scrambling to boost its computing capacity for the power-hungry generative AI products it is pushing into apps Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp and hardware devices like its Ray-Ban smartglasses, spending billions of dollars to amass arsenals of specialized chips and reconfigure data centers to accommodate them.
At the scale at which Meta operates, successful deployment of its chip could potentially shave off hundreds of millions of dollars in annual energy costs and billions in chip purchasing costs, according to Dylan Patel, founder of the silicon research group SemiAnalysis.
The chips, infrastructure, and energy required to run AI applications have become a giant sinkhole of investment for tech companies, to some degree offsetting gains made in the rush of excitement around the technology.
A Meta spokesperson confirmed the plan to put the updated chip into production in 2024, saying it would work in coordination with the hundreds of thousands of off-the-shelf graphics processing units (GPUs) - the go-to chips for AI - the company was buying.
"We see our internally developed accelerators to be highly complementary to commercially available GPUs in delivering the optimal mix of performance and efficiency on Meta-specific workloads," the spokesperson said in a statement.
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