Meta could end up owning 10% of AMD in new chip deal

Su said the mandate structure would help “ensure that we always have a free seat at the table when [Meta] think about what they will need next.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he expected AMD to be “an important partner for many years to come.”

Meta said it would nearly double its spending on AI infrastructure this year to $135 billion, as U.S. tech giants race to build data centers to train and run AI software. It’s already one of AMD’s biggest AI chip customers.

“We don’t think a single silicon solution will work for all of our workloads,” said Santosh Janardhan, Meta’s head of infrastructure. “There’s a place for Nvidia, there’s a place for AMD and… there’s also a place for our own custom silicon. We need all three.”

As part of the deal, AMD will build a custom version of its MI450 AI chips for Meta. They will primarily be used for “inference” workloads, the process of running models after they have been trained.

The chips need 6 gigawatts of power, equivalent to the amount required by 5 million American homes for a year.

Increasingly creative financing schemes to support the massive development of AI infrastructure have emerged in recent years, leading to warnings about circular financing.

AMD, for example, helped data center maker Crusoe secure a $300 million loan from Goldman Sachs by providing a backstop guaranteeing the use of its chips if Crusoe failed to find customers after installing them in an Ohio facility.

Tech giants such as Meta, historically cash-rich, meanwhile face the prospect of tapping the bond and stock markets or curbing capital returns for shareholders to help finance their unprecedented infrastructure projects. The parent company of Facebook and Instagram raised $30 billion in October, marking its largest bond sale to date.

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