Meta is teaming up with semiconductor design company Arm in a strategic move to supercharge its artificial intelligence capabilities as the social media giant ramps up its infrastructure investments.
The multi-year partnership will see Meta’s ranking and recommendation systems transition to Arm’s Neoverse platform, a chip architecture recently fine-tuned for cloud-based AI applications. This shift aims to make Meta’s AI operations more efficient while serving over 3 billion users across its family of apps.
“AI is transforming how people connect and create,” said Santosh Janardhan, Meta’s head of infrastructure. “Partnering with Arm enables us to efficiently scale that innovation to the more than 3 billion people who use Meta’s apps and technologies.”
While Arm has traditionally been recognized for its mobile CPU designs, the company has often found its graphics processing capabilities overshadowed by industry heavyweights like Nvidia. Now, Arm is pivoting to highlight its strength in energy-efficient computing a critical factor as AI data centers consume massive amounts of power.
“AI’s next era will be defined by delivering efficiency at scale,” explained Rene Haas, Arm’s CEO. “Partnering with Meta, we’re uniting Arm’s performance-per-watt leadership with Meta’s AI innovation.”
The collaboration arrives as Meta pursues an aggressive expansion of its data center infrastructure to meet surging demand for AI services. The company has two massive projects in development. The first, internally called “Prometheus,” is expected to launch in 2027 with multiple gigawatts of power capacity. Currently under construction in New Albany, Ohio, the facility will be supported by a dedicated 200-megawatt natural gas power plant.
Meta’s second project, code-named “Hyperion,” spans an enormous 2,250-acre campus in northwest Louisiana. When completed, it’s designed to deliver 5 gigawatts of computational power, with construction continuing through 2030, though some sections may become operational earlier.
What makes this partnership particularly noteworthy is its structure. Unlike recent AI infrastructure deals, Arm and Meta are not exchanging ownership stakes or substantial physical assets. This stands in sharp contrast to the investment-heavy approach taken by other chip manufacturers.
Nvidia, for instance, has been making bold financial commitments across the AI landscape, including a phased $100 billion investment in OpenAI, plus billion-dollar stakes in Elon Musk’s xAI, Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, and France’s Mistral AI.
Meanwhile, AMD a competitor to both Nvidia and Arm, recently struck a deal to provide OpenAI with 6 gigawatts of computing capacity, with OpenAI receiving AMD stock options potentially worth up to 10% of the company.
As the AI arms race intensifies, tech companies are forming strategic alliances and making massive infrastructure bets to secure their position in what many see as the next era of computing.
