Meta and AMD's Multibillion-Dollar Deal Is All About the AI Chips

Meta is joining OpenAI as one of the major tech companies to take a stake in chipmaker AMD, as part of an AI hardware buying frenzy. Meta and AMD on Tuesday announced a partnership that will involve CEO Mark Zuckerberg's tech giant buying billions of dollars' worth of AMD Instinct GPUs in order to fuel its ambitions to build out AI offerings across Meta platforms, including Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.

In a release, Meta described the deal as "multi-year," and said the AI purchase will provide Meta with up to 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs, "the silicon computing technology used to support modern AI models." 

According to the US Department of Energy, a single gigawatt (1 billion ...