Meta pulls the curtain back on its A.I. chips for the first time
Meta has built custom computer chips to help with its artificial intelligence and video-processing tasks, and is talking about them in public for the first time.
The social networking giant disclosed its internal silicon chip projects for the first time to reporters earlier this week, ahead of a Thursday virtual event discussing its AI technical infrastructure investments.
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Investors have been closely watching Meta’s investments into AI and related data center hardware as the company embarks on a “year of efficiency” that includes at least 21,000 layoffs and major cost cutting.
Although it’s expensive for a company to design and build its own computer chips, vice president of infrastructure Alexis Bjorlin told CNBC that Meta believes that the improved performance will justify the investment. The company has also been overhauling its data center designs to focus more on energy-efficient techniques, like liquid cooling, to reduce excess heat.
One of the new computer chips, the Meta Scalable Video Processor (MSVP), is used to process and transmit video to users while cutting down on energy requirements. Bjorlin said “there was nothing commercially available” that could handle the task of processing and delivering 4 billion videos a day as efficiently as Meta wanted.
The other processor is the first in the company’s Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) family of chips intended to help with various AI-specific tasks. The new MTIA chip specifically handles “inference,” which is when an already-trained AI model makes a prediction or takes an action.
Bjorlin said that the new AI inference chip helps power some of Meta’s recommendation algorithms used to show content and ads in people’s news feeds. She declined to answer who is manufacturing the chip, but a blog post said that the processor is “fabricated in TSMC 7nm process,” indicating that chip-giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing is producing the technology.
She said that Meta has a “multi-generational roadmap” for its family of AI chips that include processors used for the task of training AI models, but declined to offer details beyond the new inference chip. Reuters previously reported that Meta cancelled one AI inference chip project and started another that was supposed to roll out around 2025, but Bjorlin declined to comment on that report.
Because Meta isn’t in the business of selling cloud computing services like companies including Google-parent Alphabet or Microsoft, the company didn’t feel compelled to publicly talk about its internal data center chip projects, she said.
“If you look at we’re sharing—our first two chips that we developed—it’s definitely giving a little bit of a view into what are we doing internally,” Bjorlin said. “We haven’t had to advertise this, and we don’t need to advertise this, but you know, the world is interested.”
Meta vice president of engineering Aparna Ramani said the company’s new hardware was developed to work effectively with its home-grown PyTorch software, which has become one of the most popular tools used by third-party developers to create AI apps.
The new hardware will eventually be used to power tasks related to the metaverse, such as virtual reality and augmented reality, as well as the burgeoning field of generative AI, which generally refers to AI software that can create, compelling text, images, and videos.
Ramani also said that Meta has developed a generative AI-powered coding assistant for the company’s developers to help them more easily create and operate software. The new assistant is similar to Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot tool that it released in 2021 with help from the AI startup OpenAI.
In addition, Meta said it completed the second-phase buildout, or the final buildout, of its supercomputer dubbed Research SuperCluster (RSC), which the company detailed last year. Meta used the supercomputer, which contains 16,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs, to train the company’s LLaMA language model, among other uses.
Ramani said that Meta continues to act on its belief that it should contribute to open-source technologies and AI research in order to push the field of technology. The company has disclosed that its biggest LLaMA language model, LLaMA 65B, contains 65 billion parameters and was trained on 1.4 trillion tokens, which refers to the data used for AI training.
Companies like OpenAI and Google have not publicly disclosed similar metrics for their competing large language models, although CNBC reported this week that Google’s PaLM 2 model was trained on 3.6 trillion tokens and contains 340 billion parameters.
Unlike other tech companies, Meta released its LLaMA language model to researchers so they can learn from the technology. However, the LlaMA language model was then leaked to the wider public, leading to many developers building apps incorporating the technology.
Ramani said that Meta is “still thinking through all of our open source collaborations, and certainly, I want to reiterate that our philosophy is still open science and cross collaboration.”
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Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, speaks during an unveiling event in New York on Feb. 26, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Tuesday that he’s working to root out bureaucracy from within the company’s ranks as part of an effort to reset its culture.
Speaking at Amazon’s annual conference for third-party sellers in Seattle, Jassy said the changes are necessary for the company to be able to innovate faster.
“I would say bureaucracy is really anathema to startups and to entrepreneurial organizations,” Jassy said. “As you get larger, it’s really easy to accumulate bureaucracy, a lot of bureaucracy that you may not see.”
A year ago, as part of a mandate requiring corporate employees to work in the office five days a week, Jassy set a goal to flatten organizations across Amazon. He called for the company to increase worker-to-manager ratios by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of this year.
Jassy also announced the creation of a “no bureaucracy email alias” so that employees can flag unnecessary processes or excessive rules within the company.
Amazon has received about 1,500 emails in the past year, and the company has changed about 455 processes based on that feedback, Jassy said.
The changes are linked to Jassy’s broad strategy to overhaul Amazon’s corporate culture and operate like the “world’s largest startup” as it looks to stay competitive.
Jassy, who took the helm from founder Jeff Bezos in 2021, has been on a campaign to slash costs across the company in recent years. Amazon has laid off more than 27,000 employees since 2022, and axed some of its more unprofitable initiatives. Jassy has also urged employees to do more with less at the same time that the company invests heavily in artificial intelligence.
Transforming Amazon into a startup-like environment isn’t an easy task. The company operates sprawling businesses across retail, cloud computing, advertising, and other areas. It’s the U.S. second-largest private employer, with more than 1.5 million employees globally.
“You have to keep remembering your roots and how useful it is to be scrappy,” Jassy said.
The StubHub logo is seen at its headquarters in San Francisco.
Andrej Sokolow | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Online ticket platform StubHub is pricing its IPO at $23.50, CNBC’s Leslie Picker confirmed on Tuesday.
The pricing comes at the midpoint of the expected range that the company gave last week. At $23.50, the pricing gives StubHub a valuation of $8.6 billion. StubHub will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “STUB.”
The San Francisco-based company was co-founded by Eric Baker in 2000, and was acquired by eBay for $310 million seven years later. Baker reacquired StubHub in 2020 for roughly $4 billion through his new company Viagogo, which operates a ticket marketplace in Europe.
StubHub has been trying to go public for the past several years, but delayed its public debut twice. The most recent stall came in April after President Donald Trump‘s “Liberation Day” tariffs roiled markets.
The company filed an updated prospectus in August, effectively restarting the process to go public.
The IPO market has bounced back in recent months after an extended dry spell due to high inflation and rising interest rates. Klarna made its debut on the NYSE last week after the online lender also delayed its IPO in April. Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss’ Gemini, stablecoin issuer Circle, Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchange Bullish and design software company Figma have all soared in their respective debuts.
At the top of the pricing range StubHub offered last week, the company would have been valued at $9.2 billion. StubHub had sought a $16.5 billion valuation before it began the IPO process, CNBC previously reported.
StubHub said in its updated prospectus that first-quarter revenue increased 10% from a year earlier to $397.6 million. Operating income came in at $26.8 million for the period.
The company’s net loss widened to $35.9 million from $29.7 million a year ago.
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