Facebook parent Meta signed a deal to use Amazon’s Graviton chips for agentic AI, the latest indication of growing demand for the tech giant’s growing silicon business.
Bloomberg reports that the deal is worth billions of dollars over multiple years. It comes one day after Meta said it would lay off roughly 10% of its workforce, or about 8,000 employees, as companies across the industry cut headcount while pouring billions into AI infrastructure.
The deal gives Meta access to tens of millions of Graviton5 processor cores, running in AWS data centers, making Meta one of the largest Graviton customers in the world, the companies said. It builds on Meta’s existing use of Amazon Bedrock, the company’s platform for AI models.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a LinkedIn post that agentic AI is “becoming almost as big a CPU story as a GPU story.” In other words, while graphical processing units (mostly from Nvidia) have dominated the AI hardware conversation, agentic systems need traditional central processing units to handle the reasoning and coordination that happens between steps.
Meta has taken a broad approach, signing deals with Nvidia and AMD, recently agreeing to use Google’s custom processors, and developing its own in-house silicon with Broadcom.
“As we scale the infrastructure behind Meta’s AI ambitions, diversifying our compute sources is a strategic imperative,” said Santosh Janardhan, head of infrastructure at Meta, in a release.
Amazon is establishing itself as a major chipmaker in its own right. CEO Andy Jassy disclosed in his annual shareholder letter that Amazon’s custom silicon business is generating more than $20 billion a year in revenue, saying it’s “quite possible” Amazon will sell racks of its chips to third parties in the future. That would mean competing more directly with Nividia.
Its roster of chip customers is growing. Anthropic committed to running its models on Amazon’s Trainium processors as part of a $25 billion expanded partnership announced this week, and OpenAI agreed to use Trainium as part of a $100 billion cloud deal earlier this year.
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