Key Highlights
- A multibillion-dollar partnership between Meta and Amazon will deliver tens of millions of AWS Graviton CPU cores for AI applications over three to five years.
- The agreement spans multiple years and focuses primarily on U.S.-based infrastructure deployment.
- Premarket trading saw Meta shares increase 0.6% while Amazon stock climbed 1.4% after the announcement.
- This partnership expands Meta’s chip sourcing beyond current suppliers like Nvidia, Broadcom, and AMD.
- Meta now ranks among the top five AWS Graviton customers globally.
Meta has finalized a multibillion-dollar partnership with Amazon that will provide the social media giant access to tens of millions of Amazon Web Services’ Graviton CPU cores for its artificial intelligence agent initiatives.
According to Nafea Bshara, an Amazon VP who co-founded Annapurna Labs—AWS’s chip development division—the partnership extends from three to five years. The majority of these Graviton processors will be positioned in United States data centers.
Following the announcement, Amazon shares rose 1.4% during premarket hours, while Meta experienced a 0.6% uptick.
This partnership focuses exclusively on AWS Graviton central processing units rather than graphics processing units. While GPUs dominated AI development attention, CPUs are experiencing renewed relevance.
The emergence of AI agents has restored focus on CPU capabilities. These processors manage particular operations and channel workloads to GPUs, creating a synergistic relationship between both chip categories across diverse AI applications.
CPUs are also critical during the “post-training” stage of large language models, when base models undergo refinement for targeted applications.
Meta selected Amazon’s Graviton5, built on 3-nanometer technology, based on its cost-effectiveness and performance capabilities. “Meta has access to so many options from the supply side. But they chose Graviton5,” Bshara explained.
Expanding Meta’s Chip Ecosystem
This Amazon partnership broadens Meta’s existing chip procurement strategy, which encompasses suppliers such as Nvidia, Broadcom, AMD, and Arm Holdings. Meta has consistently emphasized its commitment to avoiding dependence on a single chip provider.
“No single chip architecture can efficiently serve every computational task,” Meta stated in its official announcement.
Initial rollout will commence with tens of millions of Graviton cores, with infrastructure expansion planned as Meta’s artificial intelligence requirements evolve.
AI Expansion and Workforce Restructuring
Meta’s commitment to artificial intelligence continues to deepen. The company completed its acquisition of AI startup Manus for over $2 billion last December. Manus specializes in developing AI agents for sophisticated operations, creating additional CPU requirements.
To support its AI infrastructure investments, Meta announced Thursday it would reduce its workforce by approximately 10%—eliminating roughly 8,000 positions—effective in May.
Earlier this month, Meta unveiled Muse Spark, its first new AI model in twelve months, with additional releases planned for the coming months.
The collaboration between Meta and AWS traces back to approximately 2016, though previous engagements primarily centered on cloud infrastructure, the Bedrock platform, and GPU cluster access. This agreement represents a substantial shift toward proprietary chip technology.
For AWS, securing Meta as a Graviton client represents significant validation. Just days ago, Amazon revealed a $5 billion commitment to Anthropic, another arrangement involving tens of millions of Graviton CPU cores.
AWS began developing proprietary chips before 2018, launching the original Graviton processor on Arm-based architecture.
Bshara verified that this agreement positions Meta among AWS’s top five Graviton customers worldwide.
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