Meta aims to make its own chips as AI giants strive for independence from strained supply chain

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta plans to design its own artificial intelligence chips in-house starting in September – part of an industry-wide effort by the biggest names in AI to start making their own chips amid ongoing high demand.Zuck’s initiative, known internally as “Iris,” centers on developing custom silicon to supercharge the AI systems behind Facebook and Instagram, Reuters reported Thursday.The social media giant — which expectes to spend up to $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year — is working with Palo Alto, Calif.-based Broadcom on design and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing on production.Meta joins a growing list of technology companies seeking to handle more of their chip development internally to cut costs and reduce dependence on Nvidia, which has dominated the AI chip business with its ultra-powerful semiconductors.Even as Meta and other companies are launching their foray into chip building, the semiconductor industry remains under tremendous demand strain, and AI companies’ efforts to become more autonomous provides no silver bullet to the supply chain conundrum.Demand for manufacturing, packaging and other chip production resources continues to outpace supply, while several specialized chip-making processes are controlled by a small number of companies already operating at capacity even as they invest mountains of capital to expand.Meta’s latest project builds on a long-running effort to develop its own chips.

Its Training and Inference Accelerators program, launched more than five years ago, has focused on in-house chip development, though progress has been slow.Development of the new chip has reportedly moved much more rapidly.Testing took just six weeks and faced no major problems, according to Reuters.

Meta plans to introduce a new chip roughly every six months through 2027, compared with the typical annual-or-longer release cycle for AI chips.Meta is aiming to double its computing infrastructure in 2027, according to Re...