Meta announces AI training and inference chip project

NEW YORK: Meta Platforms on Thursday shared new details on its data center projects to better support artificial intelligence work, including a custom chip “family” being developed in-house.

The Facebook and Instagram owner said in a series of blog posts that it designed a first-generation chip in 2020 as part of the Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) program. The aim was to improve efficiency for the recommendations models it uses to serve ads and other content in news feeds.

Reuters previously reported that the company was not planning to deploy its first in-house AI chip widely and was already working on a successor. The blog posts portrayed the first MTIA chip as a learning opportunity.