Meta announced Thursday that it is building a custom chip for AI models. Meta is increasing its AI efforts. According to Mark Zuckerberg , the CEO of the company, the company has “an opportunity to introduce AI to billions in a way that will be useful and meaningful”. The chip and infrastructure plans announced on Thursday could help Meta compete with other tech companies investing significant resources into AI.
Meta’s MTIA chip is a “custom accelerator chip family that targets inference workloads,” wrote Meta VP and Head of Infrastructure Santosh Janardhan in a recent blog post. The chip provides “greater computing power and efficiency” compared to CPUs. It is also “customized for Meta’s internal workloads”.
MTIA is a great asset for Meta. This is especially true given ‘s high demand for AI computing power. A report that the MTIA is not expected to be available until 2025.
Meta has also introduced a new ASIC that is specifically designed to assist with video transcoding. It calls it the “MSVP,” which stands for Meta Scalable Video processor. The MSVP is designed to support “both the high-quality transcoding required for VOD and the low-latency and faster processing time that live streaming require,” Meta stated in a separate post. In the future, it will also help bring AI-made content as well as AR- and VR specific content to Meta’s apps.
Meta has also been working on “next generation data center designs” that are “AI optimized” and “faster, more cost-effective, to build,” Janardhan added. The company also praised the RSC AI Supercomputer , which it’s been praising for the past year . Meta is brazenly promoting its AI hardware as it tries to differentiate itself from the increasing number of AI initiatives by many of the largest technology companies, including custom chip.
