Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

(Reuters) – Meta Platforms unveiled details on Wednesday about the next generation of the company’s in-house Artificial Intelligence (AI) accelerator chip.

Reuters reported earlier this year that the parent company of Facebook planned to deploy a new version of a custom data centre chip to address the swelling amount of computing power necessary to run AI products in Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The chip, referred to internally as “Artemis,” will help the firm reduce its reliance on NVIDIA’s AI chips and reduce its energy costs overall.

“This chip’s architecture is fundamentally focused on providing the right balance of compute, memory bandwidth, and memory capacity for serving ranking and recommendation models,” the company wrote in a blog post.

Meta’s Pivot to AI Is Complete

This latest development is part the course for Meta, whose pivot away from the metaverse and into AI was reported last year by Disruptive Tech News.

It was a little over a year ago when Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was quoted as saying, “Our single largest investment is in advancing AI and building it into every one of our products.”

Now, with a new AI chip, the company’s pivot to AI appears complete, and the company looks ready to fully leverage this game-changing innovation in every aspect of operations.

The new Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) chip is part of a broad custom silicon effort at the company that includes looking at other hardware systems too. Beyond building the chips and hardware, the company that owns Instagram and Whatsapp has made significant investments in developing the software necessary to harness the power of its infrastructure in the most efficient way.

The company is also spending billions on buying NVIDIA and other AI chips: This year CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company planned to acquire roughly 350,000 flagship H100 chips from NVIDIA. Combined with other suppliers, Meta plans to accumulate the equivalent of 600,000 H100 chips this year, he said.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co will produce the new Meta chip on its “5nm” process. Meta said it is capable of three times the performance of its first generation processor.

The chip has been deployed in the data centre and is engaged in serving AI applications. The company said it has several programs underway “aimed at expanding the scope of MTIA, including support of (generative AI) workloads.”

(0)(0)