Meta Beings Testing Its First AI Chip

Washington, 12 Mar (ONA) --- Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has begun testing its first in-house chip designed for training AI systems.

The world's biggest social media company has begun a small deployment of the chip and plans to ramp up production for wide-scale use if the test goes well, sources said.

Meta's decision to build its own AI chip is part of a longer-term strategy to reduce the company's reliance on third-party suppliers like Nvidia.

The new chip is part of Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) series. It is a single-use AI accelerator, specialized for AI-related tasks compared to general computation. Such specialized architecture can render the chip more power-efficient compared to the GPUs currently used in AI training.

Meta first plans to use the chip in its recommendation algorithms that determine content displayed on Facebook and Instagram. The company eventually aims to scale up the use of the chip to power its generative AI products, such as the AI chatbot known as Meta AI.

--- Ends/Khalid