MENLO PARK: Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, is set to deploy a new version of its in-house custom chip in its data centers later this year, according to an internal company document obtained by Reuters. This move is part of Meta’s ambitious artificial intelligence (AI) strategy, aiming to reduce its reliance on Nvidia chips and mitigate the increasing costs associated with running AI workloads.
The upcoming chip, representing the second generation of Meta’s in-house silicon line introduced last year, is expected to play a crucial role in supporting the company’s AI endeavors across its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, as well as hardware devices like its Ray-Ban smartglasses.
Meta Seeks to Enhance its Computing Capacity
The push for custom chips comes as Meta seeks to enhance its computing capacity for power-intensive generative AI products. The company has been investing billions of dollars in acquiring specialized chips and reconfiguring data centers to accommodate them.
Dylan Patel, founder of the silicon research group SemiAnalysis, suggests that at Meta’s scale, a successful implementation of its custom chip could potentially save hundreds of millions of dollars in annual energy costs and billions in chip purchasing costs.
A Meta spokesperson confirmed the plan to put the updated chip into production in 2024. The company emphasized that its internally developed accelerators would complement the commercially available graphics processing units (GPUs) it continues to purchase, ensuring an optimal balance of performance and efficiency for Meta-specific workloads.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed last month that the company aims to have approximately 350,000 flagship “H100” processors from Nvidia by the end of the year. The deployment of its own chip is part of Meta’s broader strategy, following the decision in 2022 to halt the first version of its in-house chip and opt for purchasing Nvidia GPUs instead.
