Nvidia to sell Meta millions of chips; what does the deal mean?

Nvidia on Tuesday said it ​has signed a multiyear deal to sell ⁠Meta Platforms millions of its current and future artificial intelligence chips, including central processing units that compete with products from Intel and Advanced ‌Micro Devices.

Nvidia did not disclose a value for the deal, but said it includes its current Blackwell ‌chips as well as its forthcoming Rubin AI chips. ‌It ⁠also includes standalone installations of its Grace and Vera ⁠central processors.

Nvidia introduced those central processors, based on technology from Arm Holdings, as companions to its AI chips starting 2023. But the announcement ​Tuesday signaled that Nvidia aims ‌to push those chips for emerging fields such as running AI agents as well as into markets for processors used in workaday technical tasks such as running databases. Nvidia’s ‌announcement also comes as Meta is developing its ​own AI chips and is in discussions with Google about using that company’s Tensor Processing Unit ⁠chips, or TPUs, for AI work.

Ian Buck, the general manager of Nvidia’s hyperscale and high-performance computing unit, said that Nvidia’s ‌Grace central processors have shown they can use half the power for some common tasks such as running databases, with more gains expected for the next generation, Vera.

“It actually continues down that path and makes it an excellent data center-only CPU for those high-intensity data processing back-end operations,” ‌Buck said. “Meta has already had a chance to get on Vera and ​run some of those workloads. And the results look very promising.”

While Nvidia has never disclosed its ⁠sales to Meta, it is widely believed to be among ⁠four customers that made up 61% of its revenue in its most recent fiscal quarter. Moorhead said ‌Nvidia likely highlighted the deal to show that it has retained a large business with Meta and is ​gaining traction with its central processor chips.