Broadcom to supply Meta with custom silicon through 2029 — Broadom CEO Hock Tan departs Meta's board

Broadcom and Meta this week announced the extension of their relationship with a long-term agreement under which Broadcom will supply Meta multiple generations of custom-designed Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) hardware through 2029. The package includes supplying hundreds of thousands of AI processors. The deal is significant enough for Hock Tan, chief exec of Broadcom, to leave Meta's board of directors, ostensibly to avoid a conflict of interest.

Under the terms of the deal, Broadcom will supply Meta multiple generations of custom-designed AI accelerators for training and inference that will be built around Broadcom's foundational XPU platform, which enables to combine custom differentiating silicon with standard logic, memory, and high-speed I/O to greatly improve efficiency and lower the cost of such bespoke processors. The companies are tight-lipped about the exact volumes of hardware to be supplied, though they say that it will consume multiple gigawatts of power, with initial commitments exceeding 1 GW of compute capacity. In addition, Broadcom will supply Meta Ethernet networking solutions for scale-up, scale-out, and scale-across requirements.

It is necessary to note that Broadcom participates in Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI-led multi-source agreements for unified optical compute interconnects for scale-up interconnects. To that end, Broadcom will likely supply Meta custom AI accelerators with optical scale-up interconnects over time.

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"Meta is partnering with Broadcom across chip design, packaging, and networking to build out the massive computing foundation we need to deliver personal superintelligence to billions of people," said Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "As we roll out more than 1GW of our custom silicon to start and then multiple gigawatts over time, this partnership will give us greater performance and efficiency for everything we are building."

One of the interesting implications of the deal is that MTIA accelerators use modified RISC-V-based cores from Andes Technology for scheduling and orchestration, as well as some basic processors. While compute blocks (tensor engines, vector engines, systolic arrays, etc.) are not RISC-V-based, the scale of the deal will likely benefit both Andes Technology and the RISC-V ISA ecosystem in general.

Hock Tan will step down from Meta's board of directors and move into an advisory role, likely in a bid to avoid a conflict of interest as he remains chief executive of Broadcom. Nonetheless, in his new role, he will guide Meta's custom silicon roadmap and influence its future infrastructure investments.

"We are pleased to expand our strategic collaboration with Meta as they pioneer the next frontier of artificial intelligence," said Hock Tan, President and CEO, Broadcom. "This initial MTIA deployment is just the beginning of a sustained, multi-generation roadmap to serve the trajectory of massive growth over the next few years highlighting Broadcom’s unmatched leadership in AI networking and the power of our foundational XPU custom accelerator platform."

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