Facebook’s owner has agreed to buy artificial intelligence chips from US semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices for $60bn (£44.5bn) despite concerns about the huge amount being spent on the AI industry.
Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, has signed a five-year deal to also acquire 10% of the chip company.
AMD signed a similar agreement with OpenAI last year, which was hailed as a vote of confidence in the company’s chips and software and significantly boosted its stock price.
A series of recent chip supply deals highlights the AI industry’s appetite for processors. Separately, Meta signed a deal with AMD’s larger rival Nvidia to buy millions of AI chips.
According to AMD CEO Lisa Su, AMD plans to supply 6GW worth of chips to Meta, starting with 1GW of MI450 hardware that the company plans to release in the second half of this year.
In addition to AMD’s flagship graphics chips (GPUs), Meta also plans to purchase central processors (CPUs), including versions customized to the needs of social media platforms.
Su said the custom CPU will be tuned to deliver strong performance while keeping energy consumption as low as possible. The deal will include two generations of AMD’s CPUs.
“So there’s no question that Mark is very ambitious about what he wants to accomplish, and we want to use every aspect of our technology to really help Meta achieve that,” Hsu said, referring to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “Meta is making a big bet on AMD.”
Meta helped design the MI450, which is optimized for the computing process known as inference, when chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT respond to user queries.
Industry analysts expect the market for inference hardware to shrink the market size for the equipment needed to train large-scale AI models.
Meta plans to buy chips from other vendors while continuing to develop its own processors, said Santosh Janardhan, Meta’s head of infrastructure. According to Reuters, Meta is in talks with Google about using its tensor processors (TPUs) for AI work.
The scale at which Meta was building its data centers and infrastructure required multiple chip vendors and approaches, Janardhan said.
“Eventually all chipmakers will have a seat at the same table,” Janardhan added.
