In the latest mega-deal for AI compute power, the social media giant and the AI chip leader have signed a new agreement under which Meta will use even more Nvidia chips in its data centers.
The agreement marks an extension of the companies’ existing partnership, which the vendors described as “multiyear and multigenerational”, spanning on premises, cloud and AI infrastructure.
The deal is designed to “support its build-out of data centers optimized for AI training and inference” as well as its core business, Meta said in a statement.
Although neither party provided financial details, the sums involved are likely vast — possibly stretching to tens of billions of dollars — given Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s commitment last month to spend up to $135 billion this year alone on AI.
What’s covered by the deal is Meta purchasing Nvidia Grace Central Processing Units (CPUs), as well as Blackwell and next-generation Vera Rubin GPUs. The vendors also said they are collaborating on Vera CPUs, the successor to the Grace CPUs, with “potential for large-scale deployment” in 2027, according to an Nvidia release.
Typically, GPUs and CPUs work in tandem to improve efficiency, with GPUs handling the processing required to train AI models, and CPUs more focused on system operations.
But this deal constitutes Nvidia’s first-ever Grace-only deployment, pointing to what may well be a sign of things to come, with AI vendors more reliant on standalone CPUs better suited to handling inference AI workloads.
The agreement doesn’t solely cover chips. Meta has also adopted Nvidia’s Spectrum-X Ethernet platform across its AI infrastructure for improved performance and efficiency, and the Nvidia Confidential Computing security system to enable the secure use of AI features on WhatsApp.
“No one deploys AI at Meta’s scale — integrating frontier research with industrial-scale infrastructure to power the world’s largest personalization and recommendation systems for billions of users,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in the release.
“We’re excited to expand our partnership with Nvidia to build leading-edge clusters using their Vera Rubin platform to deliver personal superintelligence to everyone in the world., Zuckerberg said in the release. “Personal superintelligence “is Zuckerberg’s often-stated vision that AI will be able to surpass human performance in most cognitive tasks.
While the deal is clearly a lucrative one for Nvidia and marks another step in Meta’s AI ambitions, it also raises questions about Meta’s ongoing efforts to create its own chips and become less reliant on Nvidia.
Meta has invested heavily in this area, but the Financial Times reported its strategy has suffered technical problems and rollout delays.
