Meta inks multibillion-dollar deal to use Amazon chips for AI
The deal is the latest Big Tech tie-up as the industry scrambles to secure sufficient processors to power AI models
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[SAN FRANCISCO] Amazon.com and Meta Platforms have struck a multibillion-US dollar deal for the social-media giant to rent hundreds of thousands of Amazon’s general-purpose chips for its AI efforts.
The multiyear deal gives Meta access to the Graviton line of processors, Nafea Bshara, an Amazon vice-president and co-founder of the company’s Annapurna Labs chips unit, said in an interview.
Artificial intelligence models capable of generating text or reasoning are typically built using graphics processing units from Nvidia. But AI developers can use general-purpose central processing units like Graviton for related tasks, including generating the responses to queries after a model is trained, a process known as inference.
“The GPUs are useless if you don’t have the CPUs next to them,” Bshara said.
Most CPUs Amazon has deployed in its data centres in recent years have been Graviton processors, an achievement for a company once heavily reliant on Intel hardware.
Amazon chief executive officer Andy Jassy said recently that the company’s silicon unit was on pace to generate US$20 billion in sales over the course of a year, and that executives were mulling selling the chips – to date found only in Amazon data centres – to other companies for use in their server farms.
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The Meta-Amazon deal announced on Friday (Apr 24) is the latest Big Tech tie-up as the industry scrambles to secure sufficient processors to power new and future AI models. OpenAI and Anthropic have said they’re increasing their use of Amazon’s in-house Trainium chips, AI accelerators the company markets as a cost-effective alternative to Nvidia’s GPUs.
Meta has taken a broad approach to securing chips for its AI efforts, citing a desire to diversify its partnerships to stay flexible. The company has signed megadeals with chipmakers like Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
Meta is also spending aggressively to develop its own silicon to help reduce costs and decrease its dependence on third-party chipmakers. The company is currently developing four iterations of its MTIA chip for AI purposes, and recently announced an expanded partnership with Broadcom for help designing and building those chips.
Meta has also agreed to spend billions on chips and other AI hardware from Nvidia and AMD. It recently signed a multibillion-US dollar deal to use so-called tensor processing units from Alphabet’s Google. BLOOMBERG
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