According to a Thursday announcement by the business, Meta is developing its first customized chip just for running AI models. The chip and other infrastructure plans unveiled on Thursday may be crucial for Meta as it ramps up its AI efforts to compete with other tech giants who are also pouring significant resources into AI. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently stated that the company sees “an opportunity to introduce AI agents to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful.”
Meta’s new MTIA chip, which stands for Meta Training and Inference Accelerator, is their “in-house, custom accelerator chip family targeting inference workloads,” according to a blog post by Santosh Janardhan, Meta’s vice president and head of infrastructure. Compared to CPUs, the chip reportedly offers “greater compute power and efficiency” and is “customized for our internal workloads.” According to Janardhan, Meta thinks that by utilizing both MTIA chips and GPUs, “we’ll deliver better performance, decreased latency, and greater efficiency for each workload.”
Given the rising demand for AI processing capacity, the MTIA may be a huge benefit for Meta. But given that it won’t be available until 2025, the MTIA chip appears to be a long way off.
The “MSVP,” or Meta Scalable Video Processor, is a new ASIC that Meta is releasing in addition to the MTIA to assist with video transcoding. According to Meta in a separate blog post, it is made to support “the high-quality transcoding needed for VOD as well as the low latency and faster processing times that live streaming requires,” and “in the future,” it will help bring things like AI-made content and AR- and VR-specific content to Meta’s apps.
According to Janardhan, Meta is also developing a “next-generation data center design” that will be “AI-optimized” as well as “faster and more economically built.” The business also bragged about the strength of its Research SuperCluster (RSC) AI Supercomputer, which it claims to be “one of the fastest AI supercomputers in the world.” This rhetoric from Meta over the RSC isn’t really new; the business has been praising the supercomputer since last year. But it seems natural that Meta would want to boast about its confidence in its own AI hardware as the business strives to distinguish out against an expanding number of AI initiatives from many of the greatest technology titans, including other custom chips.
