Semiconductor design company Arm is partnering with Meta to enhance the social media giant’s AI systems. This collaboration is happening during an unprecedented infrastructure buildout. Under the partnership, Meta’s ranking and recommendation systems will transition to Arm’s Neoverse platform. This platform was recently optimized for AI systems in the cloud.
An executive from Meta stated that AI is transforming how people connect and create. The partnership with Arm will enable the company to efficiently scale that innovation to the more than three billion people who use Meta’s apps and technologies.
Arm is best known for its mobile CPU architecture, and its GPU offerings have often been overshadowed by competitors like Nvidia. However, Arm is now emphasizing its advantage in low-power deployments. The CEO of Arm commented that AI’s next era will be defined by delivering efficiency at scale. He said that by partnering with Meta, they are uniting Arm’s performance-per-watt leadership with Meta’s AI innovation.
This multi-year partnership comes as Meta invests heavily in expanding its data center network to keep pace with anticipated demand for AI services. One project, code-named Prometheus, is expected to come online with multiple gigawatts of power in 2027. Construction is currently underway in New Albany, Ohio. A 200-megawatt natural gas project is being constructed to directly serve the project’s power needs.
Meta is also building a data center campus, code-named Hyperion, across 2,250 acres in northwest Louisiana. This campus is meant to deliver 5 gigawatts of computational power when complete. Construction is expected to continue through 2030, although some portions may come online before then.
Crucially, Arm and Meta are not exchanging ownership stakes or significant physical infrastructure. This detail sets the partnership apart from a number of recent AI infrastructure deals. Nvidia has been particularly aggressive with its investments, recently committing to a 100 billion dollar phased investment into OpenAI. Nvidia has also made billion-dollar investments into Elon Musk’s xAI, Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, and the French AI lab Mistral.
A rival to both Nvidia and Arm, AMD recently committed to supplying OpenAI with 6 gigawatts worth of compute capacity. As part of that deal, OpenAI will receive AMD stock options worth as much as 10 percent of the company.