Meta partners up with Arm to scale AI efforts

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

“AI is transforming how people connect and create,” Santosh Janardhan, Meta’s head of infrastructure, said in a statement. “Partnering with Arm enables us to efficiently scale that innovation to the more than 3 billion people who use Meta’s apps and technologies.”

Best known for its mobile CPU architecture, Arm’s GPU offerings have often been overshadowed by competitors like Nvidia. But Arm is now emphasizing its advantage in low-power deployments.

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

The multi-year partnership comes as Meta invests in vastly expanding its data center network to keep pace with anticipated demand for AI services. One project, code-named “Prometheus,” is expected to come online with multiple gigawatts of power in 2027. Construction is currently underway in New Albany, Ohio, and a 200-megawatt natural gas project is being constructed to directly serve the project’s power needs.

Meta is also building a data center campus, code-named “Hyperion,” across 2,250 acres in northwest Louisiana that’s meant to deliver 5 gigawatts of computational power when complete. Construction is expected to continue through 2030, although some portions may come online before then.

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

A rival to both Nvidia and Arm, AMD recently committed to supplying OpenAI with 6 gigawatts’ worth of compute capacity. As part of the deal, OpenAI will receive AMD stock options worth as much as 10% of the company.