Meta partners up with Arm to scale AI efforts

Semiconductor design company Arm is teaming up with Meta to improve the social media giant’s AI systems amid an unprecedented infrastructure expansion. Under the partnership, Meta’s ranking and recommendation systems will move to Arm’s Neoverse platformthat was recently optimized for AI systems in the cloud, among other things.

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

Arm’s GPU offering is best known for its mobile CPU architecture and is often overshadowed by competitors like Nvidia. But Arm is now emphasizing its advantage in low-power applications.

“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 are uniting Arm’s leadership in performance per watt with Meta’s AI innovation.”

The multi-year collaboration is something Meta invests in to enormously expand its data center network to keep up with the expected demand for AI services. One project, codenamed “Prometheus,” is expected to come online in 2027 with several gigawatts of power. Currently under construction in New Albany, Ohio, a 200-megawatt natural gas project is being constructed to directly supply the project’s power needs.

Meta is also building a data center campus codenamed “Hyperion” spanning 2,250 acres in northwest Louisiana, which will provide 5 gigawatts of computing power when completed. Construction is expected to continue through 2030, although some parts could come online before then.

Crucially, Arm and Meta are not exchanging ownership interests or significant physical infrastructure, setting this partnership apart from a number of recent AI infrastructure deals. Nvidia has been particularly aggressive with its investments, recently committing to a $100 billion phased investment in OpenAI, as well as multibillion-dollar investments in Elon Musk’s xAI, Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, and French AI lab Mistral.

AMD is a rival to both Nvidia and Arm and recently committed to providing OpenAI with 6 gigawatts of computing capacity. As part of the deal, OpenAI will receive stock options from AMD worth as much as 10% of the company.