Meta has announced a new, multi-year partnership with NVIDIA, which will see NVIDIA provide Meta with essential hardware to power its evolving artificial intelligence datacenters, and expand Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of an AI-powered future.
The new agreement will ensure that Meta is able to access the latest NVIDIA chip technology, which has become an essential element of AI infrastructure, with its H100 GPUs being the benchmark component for AI systems.
As explained by Meta: “The large-scale deployment of NVIDIA technology builds on our existing relationship and will support Meta’s build-out of data centers optimized for AI training and inference, as well as our core business. These advances will also deliver substantial improvements in performance per watt, supporting more efficient AI operations at scale.”
This is a crucial partnership for Meta, as the company continues to invest heavily in AI development, and building massive data centers to power its “super intelligence” push. Indeed, Meta recently broke ground on its 27th data center in the U.S., which is part of the hundreds of billions of dollars that Meta is investing into AI development.
And it’s not just chatbots and image generators that Meta’s looking to build.
Zuckerberg is aiming to uncover the secrets to true AI, or artificial general intelligence (AGI), which would go beyond the current forms of conversational understanding, and branch into actual thinking, with digital systems that can replicate the human brain.
Building systems that actually think, as opposed to following commands, is a far more significant step in AI development, as it requires systems that can essentially replicate brain neurons, and potentially come up with ideas and concepts beyond human understanding. That could advance human development significantly, and rapidly, but questions remain as to whether this is even possible, and what it would actually take to build an AI system that moves beyond advanced binary response, and into a level of digital consciousness.
That’s what Zuckerberg is hoping to explore with his superintelligence project, but in order to do that, he’s going to need a lot of computing power, and this partnership with NVIDIA will ensure that Meta has access to the technological components to build towards this.
Will that ensure that Meta leads the way on the next stage of AI development? It’s certainly investing the most money, with $600 billion allocated to AI data center projects over the next three years.
As such, it makes sense why NVIDIA would be keen to solidify this partnership, and that may, eventually, see Meta take the lead in the broader AI race.
