Meta has agreed to buy $60bn (£44.5bn) worth of artificial intelligence chips from US semiconductor company AMD. Meta, which owns Instagram and WhatsApp, has clinched the five-year deal in which it will also buy 10% of the chip company.
AMD signed a similar pact with OpenAI last year, which was hailed as a vote of confidence in its chips and software, significantly boosting its stock price.
A recent series of chip supply agreements underscores the AI industry’s appetite for processors. Meta has separately struck a deal with AMD’s larger rival Nvidia to buy millions of AI chips.
Agreement Details
AMD would supply 6GW worth of chips to Meta, starting with 1GW of the company’s forthcoming MI450 hardware in the second half of this year, said AMD’s chief executive, Lisa Su.
In addition to AMD’s flagship graphics chips (GPUs), Meta also plans to buy central processors (CPUs), including a variant that will be customised for the social media platform’s needs.
The custom CPU would be tuned to deliver powerful performance while keeping energy consumption as low as possible, Su said. The deal will include 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 said, referring to Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg. “Meta is making a big bet on AMD.”
