Meta is building its first custom chip specifically for running AI models, the company announced Thursday. As Meta ramps up its AI efforts (CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said the company sees “an opportunity to introduce AI agents to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful”), the chip and others Infrastructure plans revealed Thursday could be critical tools for Meta. to compete with other tech giants that also invest significant resources in AI.
Meta’s new MTIA chip, which stands for Meta Training and Inference Accelerator, is its “family of custom, in-house accelerator chips that target inference workloads,” wrote Meta VP and Head of Infrastructure Santosh Janardhan, in a blog post. The chip apparently provides “greater computing power and efficiency” than CPUs and is “customized for our internal workloads.” With a combination of MTIA chips and GPUs, Janardhan said Meta believes “we will deliver better performance, lower latency and higher efficiency for every workload.”
In addition to the MTIA, Meta is also introducing a new ASIC specifically to help with video transcoding, which it calls “MSVP” or Meta Scalable Video Processor. It is designed to support both “the high-quality transcoding required for VOD as well as the low latency and faster processing times required for live streaming.” Meta said in a separate blog postand “in the future,” it will help bring things like AI-created content and specific AR and VR content to Meta apps.
Meta is also working on a “next-generation data center design” that will be “AI-optimized” and “faster and more cost-effective to build,” Janardhan said, with the company also touting the power of its Research SuperCluster (RSC). AI Supercomputer, “which we believe is one of the fastest AI supercomputers in the world.” This isn’t exactly new rhetoric about Meta’s CSR; the company has been sharing high praise about the supercomputer since last year. But as the company tries to stand out against a growing number of AI initiatives from many of the biggest tech giants, including other custom initiatives French fries —it makes sense that Meta would want to show off its faith in its own AI hardware.
