Meta is looking beyond Nvidia GPUs to meet its future compute needs.
On Tuesday, the company signed an agreement with Amazon to deploy tens of millions of AWS Graviton cores, with the potential for future expansion. This deal builds on both companies’ long-standing cloud infrastructure partnership and makes Meta one of the world's largest Graviton customers.
Meta will use the silicon to support “various workloads” across the company, including AI efforts, with a special focus on agentic workloads.
“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 the post. “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.”
AWS Graviton processors are ARM-based CPUs, which are essential for the orchestration layer of agentic systems, tackling tasks such as managing workflow state, routing calls between agents, and coordinating the complex, multi-step tasks they require.
The Graviton5 chip, in particular, features 192 cores, a significantly larger cache than its predecessor, and support for Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), which enables low-latency, high-bandwidth communication between instances, according to the release. Amazon also touted the chips’ “leading energy efficiency,” with Graviton5 delivering up to a 25% boost over previous generations.
Our Deeper View
While thinking about compute demands in the AI race, it is easy to focus only on Nvidia and GPUs. But two things complicate that picture: the AI industry is incredibly compute-constrained, and no single company can meet that demand alone; and GPUs are not the only important component of the AI stack, a fact that becomes increasingly true as AI evolves. Nvidia competitors such as AMD, Intel, Google, and Amazon need to continue stepping up to fill the gaps. And given that demand shows no signs of slowing, the pressure on them to do so is only growing. Look for more compute deals that feature Nvidia competitors.