Meta spent tens of billions of dollars buying AMD AI chips

According to the agreement announced on February 24, within the next 5 years, Meta will buy enough MI450 GPUs from AMD to operate data centers with a capacity of up to 6 GW – equivalent to the amount of electricity consumed by 5 million US households a year. AMD also agreed to grant Meta the right to buy up to 160 million shares, equal to about 10% of the company’s shares, at a price of $0.01 per share, if certain milestones are achieved.

Lisa Su, AMD CEO, said Meta will receive the first tranche of AMD shares in the second half of the year, when the first GW chips are delivered. “In a sense, Meta is betting on AMD, we are also creating an opportunity for Meta to participate and benefit if AMD shareholders achieve good results,” Ms. Su said. “In financial terms, each GW of computing is worth tens of billions of dollars.”

Theo Reuters and Guardianthe agreement between the two parties is worth 60 billion USD, while WSJ Mentioning a figure of more than 100 billion USD.

In addition to AMD’s flagship GPUs, Meta will also purchase CPUs, including custom versions according to needs. According to Ms. Su, the custom CPU is designed to deliver powerful performance while keeping power consumption as low as possible.

“The CPU market is exploding with huge demand, driven largely by the deployment of AI infrastructure as inference capabilities expand as AI agents develop, and our product portfolio is in an extremely favorable position,” AMD CEO said in a meeting with investors on February 24.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, expects AMD to be an important partner for many years to come and sees the cooperation between the two sides as a big step forward to help diversify computing capabilities, towards personal super intelligence – an AI system designed to understand and effectively support individuals in daily life.

Last month, Meta announced plans to spend $135 billion on AI this year, and build 30 data centers, of which 26 centers will be located in the US in the near future.

Meta is one of AMD’s largest AI chip customers. The new deal was announced a week after Meta pledged to use millions of Nvidia chips for its artificial intelligence development plan. “We don’t think a single chip solution will cover all workloads. There’s room for Nvidia, AMD and also our custom chips. We need all three,” explains Santosh Janardhan, Meta’s head of infrastructure.