Meta joins hands with Arm to boost AI infrastructure
What's the story
Meta has announced a strategic partnership with semiconductor design company Arm, in a bid to enhance its artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The collaboration comes as part of an unprecedented infrastructure expansion at Meta. Under the deal, Meta's ranking and recommendation systems will be migrated to Arm's Neoverse platform, which was recently optimized for cloud-based AI applications.
Scaling impact
Meta's AI transformation for 3B+ users
Santosh Janardhan, Meta's head of infrastructure, emphasized the significance of this partnership in scaling AI innovation for over three billion users. He said, "AI is transforming how people connect and create," adding that the collaboration with Arm would help them efficiently scale that innovation across their apps and technologies.
Market competition
Arm's focus shift to low-power deployments
Arm, a leader in mobile CPU architecture, has often seen its GPU offerings overshadowed by competitors like NVIDIA. However, the company is now focusing on its strengths in low-power deployments. Rene Haas, CEO of Arm, said this partnership with Meta will define the next era of AI by delivering efficiency at scale. "Partnering with Meta," he said, "we're uniting Arm's performance-per-watt leadership with Meta's AI innovation."
Infrastructure growth
Meta's data center expansion for AI services
The multi-year deal comes as Meta invests heavily in expanding its data center network to meet the growing demand for AI services. One such project, codenamed "Prometheus," is expected to go live with several gigawatts of power by 2027. The facility is being built in New Albany, Ohio, with a 200MW natural gas project being constructed to directly serve its power needs.
Additional projects
'Hyperion' data center campus in Louisiana
Along with Prometheus project, Meta is also building a massive data center campus, codenamed "Hyperion," on 2,250 acres in northwest Louisiana. The facility is expected to deliver 5GW of computational power when complete. Construction will continue through 2030 but some parts may go live sooner.
Software collaboration
Open source software improvements for Arm architectures
Meta and Arm have also worked together to adapt Meta's AI infrastructure software for Arm architectures. The companies have made these software improvements open source, making them freely available for anyone to use. This move could drive the adoption of Arm-based architecture by improving software compatibility, a major hurdle in its wider use.