Meta begins testing its first in-house AI training chip

The world's biggest social media company has begun a small deployment of the chip and plans to ramp up production for wide-scale use if the test goes well, the sources said.

The push to develop in-house chips is part of a long-term plan at Meta to bring down its mammoth infrastructure costs as the company places expensive bets on AI tools to drive growth.

Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, has forecast total 2025 expenses of $114 billion to $119 billion, including up to $65 billion in capital expenditure largely driven by spending on AI infrastructure.

One of the sources said Meta's new training chip is a dedicated accelerator, meaning it is designed to handle only AI-specific tasks. This can make it more power-efficient than the integrated graphics processing units (GPUs) generally used for AI workloads.

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Meta is working with Taiwan-based chip manufacturer TSMC to produce the chip, this person said.

The test deployment began after Meta finished its first «tape-out» of the chip, a significant marker of success in silicon development work that involves sending an initial design through a chip factory, the other source said.

A typical tape-out costs tens of millions of dollars and takes roughly three to six months to complete, with no guarantee the test will succeed. A failure would require Meta to diagnose the problem and repeat the tape-out step.

Meta and TSMC declined to comment.

The chip is the latest in the company's Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) series. The