Meta is reportedly testing an in-house chip for coaching AI methods, part of a technique to cut back its reliance on {hardware} makers like Nvidia.
In response to Reuters, Meta’s chip, which is designed to deal with AI-specific workloads, was manufactured in partnership with Taiwan-based agency TSMC. The corporate is piloting a “small deployment” of the chip and plans to scale up manufacturing if the take a look at is profitable.
Meta has deployed customized AI chips earlier than, however solely to run fashions — not practice them. As Reuters notes, a number of of the corporate’s chip design efforts have been canceled or in any other case scaled again after failing to fulfill inner expectations.
Meta expects to spend $65 billion on capital expenditure this yr, a lot of which is able to go towards Nvidia GPUs. If the corporate manages to cut back even a fraction of that value by shifting to in-house chips, it’d be an enormous win for the social media large.
