Meta adopts hundreds of thousands of AWS Graviton chips for AI infrastructure

Around 3.6 billion people use Meta's applications every day, and the social networking company will be operating 32 data centers to handle the load with the completion of a new one in Oklahoma. But that's not enough.

Amazon's cloud unit said Friday that Meta has agreed to use Amazon's general-purpose Graviton chips in a deal that will run for at least three years.

The arrangement demonstrates Meta's willingness under CEO Mark Zuckerberg to splurge so it can meet high computing demand, alongside technology peers such as Alphabet and Microsoft. In recent weeks Meta has signed deals worth a combined $48 billion with CoreWeave and Nebius, both of which rent out access to Nvidia graphics processing units, or GPUs, that run AI models.

Amazon didn't disclose the value of its Meta deal.

Meta is counterbalancing infrastructure expansions with head count reductions. On Thursday the company announced plans to lay off around 8,000 employees, or 10% of its workforce.

Unlike Nvidia GPUs, Arm-based Graviton processors from top cloud Amazon Web Services can take care of a wide assortment of computing tasks, similar to Intel's or AMD's central processing units, or CPUs. But Graviton can still come in handy for AI workloads, specifically for refinements, or post-training, after models have been trained with large amounts of data using large-scale computing clusters.

"Graviton is one of the most used platforms for pre training by a lot of foundation model companies, and Meta is now one the newest one," said Nafea Bshara, an AWS vice president and distinguished engineer.

Bshara co-founded chip company Annapurna Labs, which Amazon acquired in 2015. Since then, Amazon has developed special-purpose chips for training and running AI models, among other components. Graviton has become a breakout hit, gaining adoption from Adobe, Apple and Snowflake. Earlier this week, Amazon-backed AI model builder Anthropic announced plans to use Graviton processors as well.

AWS says Graviton delivers the best performance for a given price of all computing options available through the EC2 computing service, while using 60% less energy.

Meta has used Graviton chips on a small scale, and now it will tap hundreds of thousands of the chips, making it one of the top five Graviton customers, Bshara said. The company has rented out Nvidia GPUs from AWS since 2017, he said.

On Thursday Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan told analysts that demand exceeds supply for its Xeon server chips.

"For the last few years, the story around high performance computing was almost exclusively about GPU and other accelerators," Tan said. "In recent months, we have seen clear signs that the CPU is reinserting itself as the indispensable foundation of the AI era."

But Meta did not choose Graviton because other kinds of CPUs were unavailable, Bshara said.

"Expanding to Graviton allows us to run the CPU-intensive workloads behind agentic AI with the performance and efficiency we need at our scale," Santosh Janardhan, Meta's head of infrastructure, was quoted as saying in a statement.