Meta partners with Arm to expand AI efforts

Semiconductor design company Arm is teaming up with Meta to boost the social media giant’s AI systems amid an unprecedented infrastructure buildout. Under the partnership, Meta’s rating and recommendation systems will move to Arm’s Neoverse platform, which was recently optimized for AI systems in the cloud, among other applications.

“AI is changing the way people communicate and create,” Santosh Janardhan, head of infrastructure at Meta, said in a statement. “Partnering with Arm enables us to efficiently scale this innovation to the more than 3 billion people using Meta apps and technologies.”

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

“The next era of AI will be defined by delivering efficiency at scale,” Arm CEO Rene Haas said in a statement. “In partnership with Meta, we are uniting Arm’s leadership in performance per watt with Meta’s innovation in AI.”

The multi-year partnership comes as Meta invests in significantly expanding its data center network to keep pace with expected demand for AI services. One project, codenamed “Prometheus,” is expected to come online with multiple power capacities in 2027. A project is currently under construction in New Albany, Ohio, and a 200-megawatt natural gas project is under construction to directly meet the project’s power needs.

Meta is also building a data center campus, codenamed “Hyperion,” on 2,250 acres in northwest Louisiana that aims to provide 5 gigawatts of compute power when completed. Construction is expected to continue until 2030, although some parts may be operational before then.

Importantly, Arm and Meta do not exchange ownership stakes or significant physical infrastructure, which sets this partnership apart from a number of recent AI infrastructure deals. Nvidia has been particularly aggressive in its investments — recently committing to a $100 billion phased investment in OpenAI, as well as $1 billion in investments in Elon Musk’s xAI, Mira Moratti’s Thinking Machines Lab, and French AI lab Mistral.

Competing with both Nvidia and Arm, AMD recently committed to providing OpenAI with 6 gigawatts of compute capacity. As part of the deal, OpenAI will receive AMD stock options worth up to 10% of the company.