Meta Deepens Custom AI Chip Push With New Broadcom Deal
In Focus
- New deal extends Meta’s partnership with Broadcom to 2029
- Broadcom will build Meta’s first AI silicon chip on a 2-nanometer process
- Broadcom designed Meta’s first MTIA AI chip
Meta is broadening its collaboration with Broadcom as part of its wider strategy to develop multiple generations of custom AI chips. A report by Reuters shows that the new AI chip deal between Meta and Broadcom extends their partnership to 2029.
The latest deal includes an initial commitment to supply more than one gigawatt of computing capacity, which is enough to power roughly 750,000 U.S. homes. Meta called the one-gigawatt commitment as the “first phase of a sustained, multi-gigawatt rollout.”
Broadcom to Design 2-Nanometer Chips
According to Broadcom, the newly designed custom Meta AI processors will be its first AI silicon built on a 2-nanometer process. The chip designers’ Ethernet networking technology will be used to connect Meta’s growing AI computer clusters at scale. Last year, Broadcom released a new networking chip called Thor Ultra that connects numerous data processing chips.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his company was working with Broadcom “across chip design, packaging, and networking to build out the massive computing foundation we need to deliver personal superintelligence to billions of people.”
Meta’s partnership with Broadcom aligns with the ambition outlined by Zuckerberg earlier this year. The social media giant plans to spend up to $135 billion on capital expenditure in 2026 as it accelerates efforts to build AI infrastructure to compete with OpenAI and Google.
Building on Previous Partnership
Broadcom’s Meta AI silicon collaboration builds on an existing agreement that is linked to Meta’s Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA). Under this deal, Broadcom supplies custom chips for use in Meta’s in-house data centers. The chip designer also provides chip design, packaging, and networking technology.
Meta already uses the first MTIA chip to run its ranking and recommendation systems on Instagram and Facebook. Three generations of the Meta MTIA AI chip are scheduled for release through 2027. The upcoming chips are designed to support inference, which is the process through which AI models respond to user queries in real-time.
Meta’s MTIA strategy is very similar to the one pioneered by Google. The search giant started building custom accelerators in 2015. MTIA reflects Meta’s long-term belief that purpose-built chips customized to its workloads would be more cost-efficient at scale compared to using Nvidia AI chips.
Other Deals Signed by Meta
Meta’s agreement with Broadcom adds to a growing list of its major chip investments that the company has made this year. Recently, Meta signed a deal with AMD to supply six gigawatts of AI compute capacity.
The company has also partnered with Arm Holdings to enhance its social media personalization. Under this partnership, Meta shifted its ranking and recommendation systems to Arm’s Neoverse platform. The social media giant is also collaborating with neocloud providers Nebius and CoreWeave to secure compute capacity.
