Meta Arms itself to the teeth by signing for 'tens of millions' of AWS Graviton cores
After flubbing the Metaverse, Zuck embraces the Neoverse
Meta plans to deploy tens of millions of Amazon Web Services' Graviton 5 CPU cores as part of a multi-year collaboration that will make the social network among the largest-ever consumers of the cloud giant’s homegrown silicon.
This compute will support Meta's agentic AI deployments. While GPUs remain essential for training and running generative AI models, the software frameworks necessary to harness those models still run on CPUs.
Amazon's latest Graviton processors feature 192 of Arm's Neoverse V3 cores along with a substantially larger L3 cache and support for memory up to DDR5 8,800 MT/s. That combo deliver a 25 percent performance uplift compared to Graviton 4.
In a statement Santosh Janardhan, Meta's head of infrastructure, characterized the collaboration with AWS as an effort to diversify the social networking company’s compute fleet.
"As we scale the infrastructure behind Meta's AI ambitions, diversifying our compute sources is a strategic imperative. AWS has been a trusted cloud partner for years," he said.
Evidence of a diversification strategy is not hard to find, because over the past few months Meta has cozied up to ARM-based CPU designers.
In February, the company revealed it was among the first to deploy Nvidia's standalone Grace CPUs at scale. Since then the social networking magnate also announced plans to deploy Nvidia's all new 88-core Vera CPUs.
Then, in March, Arm revealed it worked closely with Meta to design its first branded datacenter silicon – the “AGI CPU” which packs 136 Neoverse V3 cores into a 300 watt part.
Arm's new silicon won't make its way into Meta datacenters unit later this year. However, the similarities between the AGI CPU and Amazon's Graviton 5 chips means Meta can probably deploy in AWS for now and then bring those workloads in house again when Arm's silicon is finally ready.
Adoption of Arm datacenter processors, particularly for AI applications, is expected to drive considerable gains for the British chip designer's market share.
Analysts at Counterpoint Research recently predicted that by 2029, Arm-based CPUs will account for 90 percent of the AI ASIC server CPU market.
"While x86 architectures currently maintain a significant presence in AI server infrastructure, our generation-by-generation analysis suggests this established stronghold is swiftly transitioning toward proprietary Arm-based designs," Counterpoint analyst David Wu said in a blog post.
This shift arguably began with the launch of Nvidia's Grace CPUs in 2023. The Arm-based CPUs have since replaced x86-based parts from Intel and AMD in many of Nvidia's GPU systems.
In December, AWS revealed it was swapping out Intel's CPUs in favor of its own in its Trainium 3 AI rack systems, and just this week, Google said it would do the same replacing the x86 chips found in its TPU clusters with its own Arm-based Axion chips. ®