Meta Buys Billions in Nvidia Chips, Including Grace CPUs
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- Meta agreed to buy billions of dollars' worth of Nvidia chips under a multiyear expansion of their partnership, including a "large-scale deployment" of Nvidia's CPUs and "millions of Nvidia Blackwell and Rubin GPUs" for hyperscale data centers built for both training and inference.
- Meta is the first tech giant to announce a large-scale purchase of Nvidia's Grace CPU as a stand-alone chip, an option Nvidia revealed when it detailed the full specs of its new Vera Rubin superchip in January.
- Meta plans to dramatically increase its AI infrastructure spending this year to between $115 billion and $135 billion, up from $72.2 billion last year, and had previously estimated it would have 1.3 million GPUs total by the end of 2025.
- Nvidia spent $20 billion in December to license technology from inference-focused chip startup Groq—its largest investment to date—signaling a push into low-latency AI computing beyond its flagship GPUs.
- AI labs are diversifying chip sources as Nvidia's customers strain for compute: OpenAI signed a deal with Nvidia worth up to $100 billion, partnered with AMD for up to 6 gigawatts of chips, and announced a $10 billion deal with Cerebras for 750 MW of ultra-low-latency AI compute.
- Analyst Ben Bajarin, CEO of Creative Strategies, said the Meta deal reflects that agentic AI is driving new demand for general-purpose CPUs in data centers, though he cautioned GPUs remain the driving force—Meta's GPU purchases still outnumber its CPU orders.
Why it matters: Meta's commitment to buy Nvidia's Grace CPUs as stand-alone chips—combined with a planned $115B–$135B in AI infrastructure spend this year—validates Nvidia's "soup-to-nuts" bet that CPUs, not just GPUs, will be essential infrastructure for agentic AI, locking Meta deeper into Nvidia's ecosystem as rivals like OpenAI diversify toward AMD, Cerebras, and custom silicon.
