Meta Unveils Latest AI Chip as it Races to Gen AI Ambitions

Meta has unveiled details about the next generation of the company's in-house AI chip as the company aims to drive its AI workloads while reducing its reliance on Nvidia silicon.

The company’s latest version of its Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) family of custom-made chips is designed for Meta’s AI workloads and, the Meta says, shows significant performance improvements over MTIA v1, released in 2023. The chip is being used to help power Meta’s ranking and recommendation ads models.

Next generation of AI chips a key component of Meta’s long-term strategy

MTIA is part of Meta’s growing investment in its AI infrastructure and will complement its existing and future AI infrastructure to deliver new and better experiences across its products and services. The company says the latest MTIA chip is currently live in 16 of its data centre regions and delivering up to 3x overall better performance compared to MTIA v1.

“MTIA will be an important piece of our long-term roadmap to build and scale the most powerful and efficient infrastructure possible for Meta’s unique AI workloads,” the company said in a blog post.

“We’re designing our custom silicon to work in cooperation with our existing infrastructure as well as with new, more advanced hardware (including next-generation GPUs) that we may leverage in the future,” the company added. “Meeting our ambitions for our custom silicon means investing not only in compute silicon but also in memory bandwidth, networking and capacity as well as other next-generation hardware systems.

“We currently have several programs underway aimed at expanding the scope of MTIA, including support for generative AI (Gen AI) workloads.

Meta building compute infrastructure to support AI workloads

Meta has previously announced plans to build out massive compute infrastructure to help support its Gen AI ambitions, including the latest version of its open source Llama LLM, Llama 3, which is set to release in 2024. In a statement earlier this year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company was bringing its AI research team ‘closer together’ and that it was building out its compute infrastructure to support its future roadmap, which includes a further push into AI and a move towards artificial general intelligence.

To meet this demand, Meta, which turned 20 years old in February 2024, plans to have approximately 350,000 H100 GPUs from chip designer Nvidia by the end of 2024, Zuckerberg said. This, in combination with equivalent chips from other suppliers, Meta will have around 600,000 total GPUs by the end of the year.

“Our long term vision is to build general intelligence, open source it responsibly, and make it widely available so everyone can benefit,” Zuckerberg said. 

“We're currently training our next-gen model Llama 3, and we're building massive compute infrastructure to support our future roadmap, including 350,000 H100s by the end of this year - and overall almost 600,000 H100s equivalents of compute if you include other GPUs.”

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