Nvidia’s Deal With Meta Signals a New Era in Computing Power | WIRED

Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this storyAsk anyone what Nvidia makes, and they’re likely to first say “GPUs.” For decades, the chipmaker has been defined by advanced parallel computing, and the emergence of generative AI and the resulting surge in demand for GPUs has been a boon for the company.But Nvidia’s recent moves signal that it’s looking to lock in more customers at the less compute-intensive end of the AI market—customers who don’t necessarily need the beefiest, most powerful GPUs to train AI models, but instead are looking for the most efficient ways to run agentic AI software. Nvidia recently spent billions to license technology from a chip startup focused on low-latency AI computing, and it also started selling stand-alone CPUs as part of its latest superchip system.Yesterday, Nvidia and Meta announced that the social media giant had agreed to buy billions of dollars’ worth of Nvidia chips to provide computing power for its massive infrastructure projects—with Nvidia’s CPUs as part of the deal.The multiyear deal is an expansion of a cozy ongoing partnership between the two companies. Meta previously estimated that by the end of 2024, it would have purchased 350,000 H100 chips from Nvidia, and that by the end of 2025 the company would have access to 1.3 million GPUs in total (though it wasn’t clear whether those would all be Nvidia chips).As part of the latest announcement, Nvidia said that Meta would “build hyperscale data centers optimized for both tr...