- Meta commits to tens of millions of hosted Graviton cores
- The agreement includes infrastructure, network, power and management layers.
- Graviton5 is designed for sustained processing and multi-step task execution
Meta has signed a deal to deploy tens of millions of AWS Graviton Arm cores, making it one of the largest Graviton customers in the world.
The deal marks a major expansion of Meta and AWS’s long-standing partnership, but with one crucial difference: Meta isn’t just buying chips; it buys all the infrastructure around them. This is a wholesale deal and not a hardware purchase.
“As we evolve the infrastructure behind Meta’s AI ambitions, diversifying our compute sources is a strategic imperative,” said Santosh Janardhan, Head of Infrastructure at Meta.
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Why Agentic AI is Driving Massive Demand for CPUs
While GPUs remain essential for training large AI models, the rise of agentic AI is creating massive demand for CPU-intensive workloads.
Agent systems perform real-time reasoning, code generation, search operations, and multi-stage task orchestration, all of which are highly dependent on processor power.
Graviton5 is specifically designed for these workloads, delivering faster data processing and greater bandwidth than general-purpose alternatives.
The chip features 192 Arm Neoverse V3 cores, 600MB of total cache, and supports DDR5 8800 and PCIe Gen6 memory.
Meta will use these chips to support its AI tools that require handling billions of interactions while coordinating complex, multi-step agent workflows.
This deal could be seen as a blow to AMD and Intel, two companies that have traditionally dominated the large-scale infrastructure processor market.
Meta purchases not only tens of millions of Graviton cores, but also the power, data center space, networking, and AWS management tools surrounding those cores.
This means Meta is choosing AWS’s vertically integrated infrastructure rather than buying off-the-shelf chips and integrating them into its own data centers.
How the Graviton infrastructure works
Graviton5 is based on 3nm chip technology, a manufacturing process that produces smaller, more efficient processors.
It has a Nitro system that allows bare metal instances while providing familiar networking and storage devices.
This allows Meta to run its own virtual machines without compromising performance.
AWS designs its chips from the ground up and controls the entire process, from chip design to server architecture.
Therefore, it can optimize performance and efficiency in ways that conventional processors cannot match.
Meta likes such capability because it means chips can be modified to achieve specific performance levels.
As Meta’s AI capabilities grow, deployment will likely expand beyond the initial tens of millions of cores.
The deal between Meta and AWS is obviously big, but it’s important to distinguish between buying infrastructure and buying chips.
Meta does not take delivery of Graviton processors for installation in its own data centers; it rents large-scale computing capacities hosted on AWS.
“It’s not just about fleas; it’s about providing customers with foundational infrastructure, as well as data and inference services, to create AI that effectively understands, anticipates and adapts to billions of people around the world,” said Nafea Bshara, vice president and distinguished engineer at Amazon.
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