Facebook parent company Meta is reportedly expanding its massive AI spending by striking a chip partnership with Google. Citing a report from The Information, news agency Reuters said that the Mark Zuckerberg-led company has signed a multi-billion dollar deal to rent Google’s specialised artificial intelligence (AI) chips to build its next generation of AI models.
If true, this multi-year agreement comes days after the social media company announced a tie-up with AMD.
Meta’s deals with other chipmakers
Meta currently has deals with two of the biggest chipmakers: Nvidia and AMD. Earlier this week, AMD announced it would sell up to $60 billion worth of AI chips to Meta. The deal involves deploying up to 6 gigawatts of AI computing power to the social media giant’s next generation of AI infrastructure across multiple generations of AMD Instinct GPUs.Further, Meta recently signed another deal to buy Nvidia’s current and future high-end processors. The company is one of chipmaker’s biggest customers, buying the GPUs to power key tasks such as the training of its AI models.The Information reported that beyond just renting, Meta is in talks to buy Google’s TPUs outright for its own data centres as early as next year. Notably, Google is the latest company to offer expanded access to its proprietary Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) for external, third-party and corporate users.
Google originally built these chips only for its own use, it is now renting them out to other companies. This shift has turned Google’s cloud business into a massive money-maker.While GPUs are used to train AI models, Google’s TPUs are used for inference – a term used to help AI models quickly make knowledge-based outputs at a lower cost.
The ‘December report’ that wiped $250 billion from its market value
In December, a report claims that Meta Platforms was in advanced talks to spend billions on Google’s competing AI chips.
This hammered Nvidia’s stock, erasing roughly $250 billion in market value. Nvidia issued a public statement defending its market position.“We’re delighted by Google’s success — they’ve made great advances in AI, and we continue to supply to Google. Nvidia is a generation ahead of the industry — it’s the only platform that runs every AI model and does it everywhere computing is done,” Nvidia wrote in a post on X. Notably, Google is also one of the biggest customers of Nvidia GPUs.
