META
Meta’s chip diet gets a new chef
Meta apparently wants another company in the kitchen. According to a report, it’s in talks with Samsung Foundry to manufacture its next wave of custom AI chips, with the deal reportedly topping 10 trillion won, or about $6.53 billion. That’s not pocket change — that’s “hire a whole new supply chain” money.
Why this matters
The chips in question are Meta’s in-house MTIA accelerators, which the company wants to use to power its AI ambitions and eventually support outside customers too. Think of it as Meta trying to own more of the picks-and-shovels business instead of renting every shovel from Nvidia forever.
If Samsung is the manufacturing partner, the chips could be built on its advanced 2-nanometer process starting with the third-generation MTIA. That would give Meta a fancy new way to keep its AI roadmap moving while it chases a pretty wild goal: building 5-gigawatt data centers by 2030 and rolling out a new AI chip every six months. Ambitious? Extremely. Silicon Valley loves a moonshot, even when the moonshot needs a foundry.
The ripple effect
The report also threw in a little industry chessboard drama:
- Anthropic is reportedly considering Samsung Foundry for its own custom AI chips
- That would help it lean less on Nvidia GPUs and Google’s TPUs
- Samsung, meanwhile, keeps trying to turn itself into the place everyone goes when they want bleeding-edge chips without building a fab from scratch
Big picture: if this deal is real, it’s another sign that the AI race is drifting from software bragging rights into a very expensive manufacturing arms race. And in that race, the foundry gets a seat at the cool-kids table.