Meta's pricey bet on AI comes with new custom chips, coder tools

In Meta Platforms Inc.'s year of cost cutting and layoffs, there's one area that's seeing record spending: an update of the social media giant's infrastructure to keep pace in the artificial intelligence arms race.

On Thursday, the Facebook owner unveiled a slew of new technologies, including a new chip developed in-house to help train AI faster, and a tool that helps coders get suggestions for how to build their products. The company is also revamping its data centers to make it easier to deploy AI technology.

"This work reflects long term efforts that will enable even more advances and better use of this technology across everything we do," Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said.

The custom accelerator chip will help speed up the recommendation algorithm that powers what people see on Facebook and Instagram. A new data center design is being rolled out specifically for hardware that's best for AI. Meta said it has also finished the second phase of building its AI supercomputer to train large language models, which are technologies similar to those that power ChatGPT.