On Thursday, Meta Platforms (META.O) revealed fresh details about initiatives it was working on to make its data centers better suited to supporting artificial intelligence work, including a proprietary chip “family” that it said it was building in-house.
In a series of blog posts, Facebook and Instagram owner said it designed a first-generation chip in 2020 as part of the Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) program, which aimed to improve efficiency for the recommendation models it uses to serve ads and other content in news feeds.
According to Reuters, the corporation does not intend to extensively deploy its first in-house AI processor and is already working on a replacement. The initial MTIA chip was portrayed in the blog entries as a learning opportunity.
“From this initial program, we have learned invaluable lessons that we are incorporating into our roadmap,” it wrote.
The first MTIA chip was focused exclusively on an AI process called inference, in which algorithms trained on huge amounts of data make judgments about whether to show, say, a dance video or a cat meme as the next post in a user’s feed, the posts said.
A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on deployment timelines or elaborate on the company’s plans to develop chips that could train the models as well.
Meta has been engaged in a massive project to upgrade its AI infrastructure this past year, after executives realized it lacked the hardware and software needed to support demand from product teams building AI-powered features.
As part of that, the company scrapped plans for a large-scale rollout of an in-house inference chip and started work on a more ambitious chip capable of performing both training and inference, according to the Reuters reporting.
Meta acknowledged in its blog posts that its first MTIA chip stumbled with high-complexity AI models, although it said the chip handled low- and medium-complexity models more efficiently than competitor chips.
The MTIA chip also used only 25 watts of power – a fraction of what market-leading chips from suppliers such as Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O) consume – and used an open-source chip architecture called RISC-V, Meta said.
In addition to detailing its chip work, Meta provided an update on plans to redesign its data centers around more modern AI-oriented networking and cooling systems, saying it would break ground on its first such facility this year.
The new design would be 31% cheaper and could be built twice as quickly as the company’s current data centers, an employee said in a video explaining the changes.
