Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is planning to expand its data centers. This comes as other artificial intelligence companies continue to bring new developments. Meta is reportedly aiming to launch new AI-powered chips. These AI-powered chips will be produced in–house in collaboration with Broadcom.
Meta has invested heavily in building an in-house team capable of designing chips at scale. This initiative is quite similar to big tech companies and their competitors, such as Microsoft and Alphabet. In addition to forming an AI chip team, the tech giant plans to purchase off-the-shelf products from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Nvidia.
Reportedly, Zuckerberg is aiming to create chips designed to tackle the specific types of data crunching. The upcoming AI-powered chips are likely to be designed to use less energy and be more cost-effective than usual AI chips.
The upcoming AI chips will be part of Meta's Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) program. Also, the first one from the set of the new chips is named as MTIA 300. This chip will also power the company's ranking and recommendation systems.
The other three are expected to be out this year, and the final two chips in 2027. The final two chips are named MTIA 450 and 500. These are designed to perform inference. This can be defined as a process in which an AI model responds to customer queries and requests (just like the one that powers ChatGPT).
In response to the future plans of Meta, “We see inference demand exploding at the moment and that's what we're currently focused on,” Yee Jiun Song, Meta's vice president of engineering, explained in an interview.
Initially, Meta saw some success with inference chips. But it has been struggling a lot with its long-term goal of creating a generative AI training chip. The aim was to build a chip capable of creating large models which can power AI apps. Also, the MTIA 400 is on track to be used in Meta’s data centers. The tech company also plans to release the new chips within six-month intervals.
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