The proprietor of Facebook has agreed to purchase $60bn (£44.5bn) of synthetic intelligence chips from the US semiconductor firm Advanced Micro Devices despite fears over the vast sums being spent on the AI industry.
Meta, which additionally owns Instagram and WhatsApp, has clinched the five-year deal through which it should additionally purchase 10% of the chip firm.
AMD signed an analogous pact with OpenAI final yr, which was hailed as a vote of confidence in its chips and software program, considerably boosting its inventory value.
A latest collection of chip provide agreements underscores the AI trade’s urge for food for processors. Meta has individually struck a deal with AMD’s bigger rival Nvidia to purchase tens of millions of AI chips.
AMD would provide 6GW value of chips to Meta, beginning with 1GW of the corporate’s forthcoming MI450 {hardware} within the second half of this yr, mentioned AMD’s chief govt, Lisa Su.
In addition to AMD’s flagship graphics chips (GPUs), Meta additionally plans to purchase central processors (CPUs), together with a variant that can be customised for the social media platform’s wants.
The customized CPU could be tuned to ship highly effective efficiency whereas preserving vitality consumption as little as doable, Su mentioned. The deal will embrace two generations of AMD’s CPUs.
“So no question Mark is very, very ambitious in what he wants to accomplish, and we want to use every aspect of our technology to really help Meta to accomplish that,” Su mentioned, referring to Meta’s chief govt, Mark Zuckerberg. “Meta is making a big bet on AMD.”
Meta contributed to the MI450 design, which is optimised for a computing course of generally known as inference – when a chatbot equivalent to OpenAI’s ChatGPT responds to a person’s queries.
Industry analysts anticipate the marketplace for inference {hardware} to dwarf the dimensions of the marketplace for the gear wanted to coach massive AI fashions.
Meta deliberate to proceed to purchase chips from different distributors and develop its in-house processors on the identical time, mentioned Santosh Janardhan, the corporate’s infrastructure head. Meta has been in discussions with Google about utilizing the corporate’s tensor processors (TPUs) for AI work, Reuters reported.
The scale at which Meta was constructing datacentres and infrastructure required a number of chip distributors and approaches, Janardhan mentioned.
“All of the chipmakers end up having sort of a seat at the table,” Janardhan added.
