Meta signs deal with Amazon for graviton chips

Meta announced plans to cut around 8,000 employees roughly 10% of its workforce on Thursday. By Friday, it had signed a multi-year chip deal with Amazon. The contrast captures exactly where CEO Mark Zuckerberg has decided to place his bets: fewer people, far more computing power.

Amazon Web Services confirmed Friday that Meta has agreed to use its Graviton processors in an arrangement running for at least three years. The financial terms were not disclosed, but the scale is significant that Meta will deploy hundreds of thousands of Graviton chips, making it one of AWS's top five Graviton customers globally, according to Nafea Bshara, an AWS vice president and distinguished engineer.

Graviton chips are general-purpose Arm-based processors closer in function to Intel or AMD CPUs than to Nvidia's GPUs. They are not designed for the heavy parallel processing that training large AI models demands, but they handle a different and increasingly important role: the CPU-intensive workloads that power agentic AI, where models take sequences of actions, make decisions, and interact with other software in real time.

Meta has rented Nvidia GPUs from AWS since 2017 and has not moved away from them. The Graviton deal is an expansion, not a replacement, a sign that the infrastructure requirements for running AI at Meta's scale now exceed what any single chip architecture can cover efficiently.

In recent weeks alone, Meta has committed a combined $48 billion to CoreWeave and Nebius, both GPU rental platforms built on Nvidia hardware. Graviton fills a different gap. AWS says the chips deliver the best price-performance ratio across its EC2 computing service while consuming 60% less energy than comparable options, a meaningful figure when operating 32 data centres serving 3.6 billion daily users.

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan told analysts this week that demand for its Xeon server chips is outpacing supply, and that "the CPU is reinserting itself as the indispensable foundation of the AI era."