Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks in the course of the Meta Connect occasion at Meta headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 27, 2023.
Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images
Meta is spending billions of dollars on Nvidia’s in style laptop chips, that are on the coronary heart of synthetic intelligence analysis and tasks.
In an Instagram Reels post on Thursday, Zuckerberg mentioned the corporate’s “future roadmap” for AI requires it to construct a “large compute infrastructure.” By the top of 2024, Zuckerberg mentioned that infrastructure will embody 350,000 H100 graphics cards from Nvidia.
Zuckerberg did not say what number of of the graphics processing items (GPUs) the corporate has already bought, however the H100 did not hit the market till late 2022, and that was in restricted provide. Analysts at Raymond James estimate Nvidia is promoting the H100 for $25,000 to $30,000, and on eBay they’ll value over $40,000. If Meta had been paying on the low finish of the value vary, that may quantity to shut to $9 billion in expenditures.
Additionally, Zuckerberg mentioned Meta’s compute infrastructure will include “virtually 600k H100 equivalents of compute for those who embody different GPUs.” In December, tech corporations like Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft mentioned they’d use the brand new Instinct MI300X AI computer chips from AMD.
Meta wants these heavy-duty laptop chips because it pursues analysis in synthetic common intelligence (AGI), which Zuckerberg mentioned is a “long run imaginative and prescient” for the corporate. OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind unit are additionally researching AGI, a futuristic kind of AI that is akin to human-level intelligence.
Meta’s chief scientist Yann LeCun stressed the significance of GPUs throughout a media occasion in San Francisco final month.
″[If] you suppose AGI is in, the extra GPUs it’s important to purchase,” LeCun mentioned on the time. Regarding Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, LeCun mentioned “There is an AI battle, and he is supplying the weapons.”
In Meta’s third-quarter earnings report, the corporate said that complete bills for 2024 shall be within the vary of $94 billion to $99 billion, pushed partly by computing enlargement.
“In phrases of funding priorities, AI shall be our greatest funding space in 2024, each in engineering and laptop assets,” Zuckerberg mentioned on the decision with analysts.
Zuckerberg mentioned on Thursday that Meta plans to “open supply responsibly” its yet-to-be developed “common intelligence,” an method the corporate is additionally taking with its Llama family of large language models.
Meta is presently coaching Llama 3 and is additionally making its Fundamental AI Research crew (FAIR) and GenAI analysis crew work extra intently collectively, Zuckerberg mentioned.
Shortly after Zuckerberg’s publish, LeCun mentioned in a post on X, that “To speed up progress, FAIR is now a sister group of GenAI, the AI product division.”
— CNBC’s Kif Leswing contributed to this report
WATCH: The AI dark horse: Why Apple could win the next evolution of the AI arms race