dailyloe.com – Meta and Broadcom announced a sweeping partnership extension on Tuesday for designing Meta’s custom AI accelerators through 2029. The deal includes an initial commitment from Meta to deploy 1 gigawatt of its Training and Inference Accelerators. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan also informed Meta he will not seek reelection to its board. Tan had joined the Meta board in 2024.
Meta’s co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, commented on the partnership in a statement. He said Meta is partnering with Broadcom across chip design, packaging, and networking. The goal is to build a massive computing foundation. This foundation aims to deliver personal superintelligence to billions of people.
The agreement will eventually see Meta deploying multiple gigawatts of chips based on Broadcom technology. Broadcom stated the MTIA chips will be the first AI silicon to use a 2 nanometer process. Following the announcement, Broadcom shares rose 3% in extended trading. Meta’s stock price was flat.
Hock Tan addressed the status of Meta’s chip roadmap on a recent earnings call. He said Meta’s custom accelerator, MTIA roadmap, is alive and well. Tan stated they are shipping now and will scale to multiple gigawatts in 2027. This statement was made contrary to recent analyst reports.
Meta unveiled four new versions of its in-house MTIA chips in March. The company first unveiled its custom silicon in 2023. This followed similar chip programs at Google and Amazon. Hyperscalers are seeking alternatives to costly, constrained GPUs from Nvidia and AMD.
These companies are making GPU alternatives called application-specific integrated circuits. ASICs are smaller and cheaper than general-purpose AI workhorse GPUs. However, they are limited to performing a narrower set of tasks. The push is to power AI data centers more efficiently.
Google was first to the custom ASIC game, releasing its first Tensor Processing Unit in 2015. Amazon was next, announcing its first custom chip in 2018. These tech giants incorporate their AI chips into their cloud platforms. Meta’s MTIA chips are used entirely for internal purposes.
The new deal comes two weeks after another major Broadcom announcement. Broadcom announced a long-term agreement with Google for producing its TPUs. It also said Anthropic would access 3.5 gigawatts worth of the in-house Google chip. This series of deals highlights the intense activity in custom AI silicon.[]
Source: CNBC
