Nvidia said on Tuesday it has entered a multiyear agreement to sell Meta Platforms millions of its current and future artificial intelligence chips, along with standalone central processing units that compete with offerings from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. The companies did not disclose a monetary value for the arrangement.
The contract covers Nvidia's existing Blackwell family of AI accelerators and its forthcoming Rubin AI chips. It also includes separate installations of Nvidia's Grace and Vera central processors. Nvidia introduced Grace and Vera - CPUs built on Arm Holdings technology - beginning in 2023 as companions to its AI accelerators.
The announcement signals an effort by Nvidia to extend the use of those Arm-based CPUs beyond companion roles and into emerging workloads such as running AI agents, as well as into more conventional server tasks including database operations.
Meta, meanwhile, is advancing its own chip development and has been in discussions with Google about the possible use of that company's Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, for AI workloads. Those parallel efforts by Meta represent an alternative path for some of its infrastructure needs.
Ian Buck, general manager of Nvidia's hyperscale and high-performance computing unit, said Nvidia's Grace central processors have demonstrated the ability to use roughly half the power for certain common tasks - citing database workloads as an example - and that additional efficiency gains are expected with the next-generation Vera processors.
"It actually continues down that path and makes it an excellent data center-only CPU for those high-intensity data processing back-end operations," Buck said. "Meta has already had a chance to get on Vera and run some of those workloads. And the results look very promising."
Nvidia has not disclosed the size of its sales to Meta. Analysts widely believe Meta is one of four customers that together accounted for 61% of Nvidia's revenue in its most recent fiscal quarter. Commentators say Nvidia likely promoted the deal to underscore that it has maintained substantial business with Meta while also showing traction for its central processor lineup.
Context and implications
The pact aligns Nvidia's strategy of positioning Arm-based CPUs as data-center-focused processors for intensive back-end tasks, while keeping the company in supply conversations with a major hyperscaler that is simultaneously pursuing in-house silicon and exploring other third-party accelerators.