Meta (NASDAQ:META) has built custom computer chips to help with its artificial intelligence and video-processing tasks and is talking about them in public for the first time.
The social networking giant disclosed its internal silicon chip projects for the first time to reporters earlier this week, ahead of a virtual event Thursday discussing its AI technical infrastructure investments.
Investors have been closely watching Meta’s investments into AI and related data center hardware as the company embarks on a “year of efficiency” that includes at least 21,000 layoffs and major cost cutting.
Although it’s expensive for a company to design and build its own computer chips, vice president of infrastructure Alexis Bjorlin told reporters Meta believes that the improved performance will justify the investment. The company has also been overhauling its data center designs to focus more on energy-efficient techniques, such as liquid cooling, to reduce excess heat.
One of the new computer chips, the Meta Scalable Video Processor, or MSVP, is used to process and transmit video to users while cutting down on energy requirements. Bjorlin said “there was nothing commercially available” that could handle the task of processing and delivering 4 billion videos a day as efficiently as Meta wanted.
The other processor is the first in the company’s Meta Training and Inference Accelerator, or MTIA, family of chips intended to help with various AI-specific tasks. The new MTIA chip specifically handles “inference,” which is when an already trained AI model makes a prediction or takes an action.
META shares dropped $1.21 to $245.64.
