Meta Agrees to Deploy Millions of Amazon AI Chips in Deal Worth Billions

In brief

• Meta signed an agreement with Amazon Web Services to deploy tens of millions of Graviton5 processors for AI workloads.
• AWS VP Nafea Bshara said the multi-year deal would be worth billions of dollars.
• Meta confirmed Thursday that it will lay off 8,000 employees.

Social media giant Meta signed an agreement with Amazon Web Services to deploy tens of millions of Graviton5 processors for its next-generation AI infrastructure, making the company one of AWS's largest Graviton customers globally.

The partnership spans three to five years and will be worth billions of dollars, AWS Vice President Nafea Bshara told Reuters. Meta will deploy Amazon’s fifth-generation CPU processors, which are purpose-built for agentic AI workloads—applications that can reason, generate code, and orchestrate multi-step tasks independently.

Each Graviton5 chip contains 192 cores that can be assigned to different tasks simultaneously, enabling parallel processing for complex AI workflows.

“As we scale the infrastructure behind Meta's AI ambitions, diversifying our compute sources is a strategic imperative,” said Meta Head of Infrastructure Santosh Janardhan, in a statement. “AWS has been a trusted cloud partner for years, and expanding to Graviton allows us to run the CPU-intensive workloads behind agentic AI with the performance and efficiency we need at our scale.”

The deal underscores how major technology companies are expanding beyond graphics processors that have dominated AI model training. As AI applications mature from research to production, companies increasingly need CPUs optimized for running trained models efficiently—handling user queries, generating responses, and managing complex reasoning tasks in real time.

The deal comes one day after Meta, the parent company behind Facebook and Instagram, confirmed reports of mass layoffs, with 8,000 jobs to be cut and 6,000 open positions to remain unfilled. The shift comes as Meta increasingly positions AI as its north star and attempts to compete with powerful rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

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