Meta partners with Arm to expand AI efforts

Semiconductor design company Arm is partnering with Meta to power the social media giant’s AI systems in an unprecedented infrastructure build. Under the partnership, Meta’s ranking and recommendation system will be migrated to Arm’s Neoverse platform. The platform has recently been optimized for implementations such as AI systems on the cloud.

“AI is transforming the way people connect and create,” Santosh Janardhan, head of infrastructure at Meta, said in a statement. “By partnering with Arm, we can efficiently extend that innovation to the more than 3 billion people using Meta’s apps and technology.”

Best known for its mobile CPU architecture, Arm’s GPU products have often been overshadowed by competitors like Nvidia. However, Arm is now highlighting its benefits in low power deployments.

“The next era of AI will be defined by delivering efficiency at scale,” Arm CEO Rene Haas said in a statement. “By partnering with Meta, we combine Arm’s performance-per-watt leadership with Meta’s AI innovation.”

This multi-year partnership comes as Meta invests in a significant expansion of its data center network to meet anticipated demand for AI services. One of the projects, codenamed “Prometheus,” is scheduled to be operational in 2027, delivering several gigawatts of power. Construction is currently underway in New Albany, Ohio, where a 200-megawatt natural gas project is being built to directly support the project’s electricity needs.

Meta is also building a data center campus, code-named Hyperion, on 2,250 acres in northwest Louisiana. Once completed, it will deliver 5 gigawatts of computing power. Construction is expected to last until 2030, but some parts may be operational before then.

Importantly, Arm and Meta are not exchanging ownership or critical physical infrastructure, making this partnership different from many recent AI infrastructure deals. Nvidia has been a particularly aggressive investor, recently pledging a $100 billion phased investment in OpenAI as well as $1 billion in investments in Elon Musk’s xAI, Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, and French AI lab Mistral.

Nvidia and Arm rival AMD recently committed to providing 6 gigawatts worth of computing power to OpenAI. As part of the transaction, OpenAI will receive AMD stock options worth 10% of the company’s stock.