Meta Platforms has unveiled a roadmap of four new chips the company is making in-house, as it rapidly expands its data centres.
Like many big tech companies such as Alphabet and Microsoft, Meta has invested heavily in building a team that can design chips in-house in addition to purchasing off-the-shelf products made by Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.
Making chips designed to tackle the specific types of data-crunching Meta requires can lead to designs that use less energy and at a better cost.
The new chips are part of the company’s Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) programme, and the first of the new chips called the MTIA 300 is in use powering the company’s ranking and recommendation systems. The other three will be rolled out this year and in 2027, with the final two chips, the MTIA 450 and 500 being designed to perform inference, the process when an AI model such as the one that powers the ChatGPT app responds to customer queries and requests.
“We see inference demand exploding at the moment and that’s what we’re focused on,” Yee Jiun Song, Meta’s vice-president of engineering, said in an interview.
Meta has had some success with inference chips but has struggled with its long-time ambitions to make a generative AI training chip, capable of building the large models that power AI apps.
Beginning with the MTIA 400, which the company says is on the path to being used in its data centres, Meta has designed an entire system around the chips, which is roughly the size of several server racks and includes a version of liquid cooling.
The company plans to release the new chips at six-month intervals because it is rapidly expanding the number of data centres it uses to run apps such as Instagram and Facebook, Song said.
“That is the reality of how quickly our infrastructure is being built out,” Song said.
The company said in January it expects capital spending of between $115bn (R1.9-trillion) and $135bn this year.
Meta contracts Broadcom to help with some elements of the designs, though Song did not specify which chips. The company uses Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing to fabricate the processors.
In February, Meta signed big deals with Nvidia and AMD to buy tens of billions of dollars worth of chips.
Reuters
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