Meta Unveils Its Latest AI Chip—Here’s What You Need To Know

Meta Platforms (META) on Wednesday announced the latest version of its custom artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Next Gen Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA), as tech companies work to reduce their reliance on Nvidia (NVDA) amid the AI boom.

The Meta announcement comes just a day after Google announced a custom silicon chip. Microsoft (MSFT) and Amazon (AMZN) have already made their own AI-capable custom chips.

These companies face pressure to internally develop their chips to manage the cost structure, CFRA analyst Angelo Zino told Investopedia, adding that while “there’s a need for these chips,” they may not be able to “keep up with the advancements” expected from the likes of Nvidia’s Blackwell platform.

The latest MTIA is a part of Meta’s family of custom chips designed for AI workloads. Meta unveiled its first generation of the MTIA in 2023.

The Next Gen MTIA, which is built on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s (TSM) tech, offers three times better performance than the first-generation chip and improved energy efficiency, Meta said.

“This new version of MTIA more than doubles the compute and memory bandwidth of our previous solution while maintaining our close tie-in to our workloads,” Meta said, adding that the chip is “designed to efficiently serve the ranking and recommendation models that provide high-quality recommendations to users.”

Meta shares were up 0.4% to $519.20 as of 2:30 p.m. ET Wednesday. The stock has surged nearly 50% since the start of the year.