By Stephen Nellis
SAN FRANCISCO, April 24 (Reuters) – Meta Platforms and Amazon.com on Friday said Meta will use Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Graviton5 central processing unit (CPU) chips, a deal an AWS executive told Reuters would span multiple years and be worth billions of dollars.
• Meta will use “tens of millions of cores” worth of Graviton chips. Each chip itself contains 192 cores, but they can each be assigned to different tasks.
• While graphics processing units (GPUs) made by firms such as Nvidia remain essential for training AI models, once they are trained and deployed they often run on CPUs.
• The CPU market is undergoing an AI-driven renaissance, with Intel saying this week CPU prices were rising as demand soars.
• AWS has been developing its in-house CPU since 2018 and is now on its fifth generation of the chip, which it buys directly from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
• “We pass that savings on to the customers,” Nafea Bshara, vice president and distinguished engineer at Amazon Web Services, told Reuters, saying the Meta deal would span multiple years and be worth billions of dollars.
• Meta has previously signed large chip deals with Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, and also has worked closely with Arm Holdings on Arm’s new CPU.
• “As we scale the infrastructure behind Meta’s AI ambitions, diversifying our compute sources is a strategic imperative,” Santosh Janardhan, head of infrastructure at Meta, said in a statement.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Tom Hogue)
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