Mark Zuckerberg is sitting on a mountain of the hottest commodity in tech right now
Meta will reportedly own more than 340,000 of Nvidia's highly sought after H100 chips this year.
Meta estimates it'll have a total stockpile of 600,000 chips by end-2024, The Verge reported.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg is aiming to make Meta an AI-first company.
Meta is on track to stockpile hundreds and thousands of sought-after semiconductors as it seeks to get ahead in the AI wars.
The tech giant will have more than 340,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs — the main chips that companies like OpenAI use to train and deploy AI models like ChatGPT — by the end of 2024, Mark Zuckerberg told The Verge.
And that's not all. CEO Zuckerberg expects Meta to have amassed a total of 600,000 GPUs, including Nvidia's A100s and other AI chips, by year-end.
The details come as companies scramble to get their hands on Nvidia's limited supply of AI chips in an effort to build the best products. The company's products have been in such high demand by major companies and startups alike that its stock has risen by over 200% in the last 12 months. Overall, global demand for semiconductors has been outstripping production.
And it appears that Meta is ahead of the AI curve on the chip front. In 2023, Nvidia shipped 150,000 of its H100 chips to Meta, according to data from Omdia Research obtained by The Verge. That's three times more than to companies including Google, Amazon, and Oracle, Omdia estimates. Only Microsoft took delivery of a similar amount to Meta.
H100 chips cost between $25,000 and $40,000 each, CNBC reported in November, citing estimates from Raymond James.
Meta's mountain of chips points to the company's strategy to become an AI-first company. Last July, Meta launched its large language model, Llama 2, to the public, which competes with OpenAI's GPT-4 model that powers ChatGPT. In September, Meta released its latest iteration of the Ray-Ban Smart Glasses, including an AI assistant. That same month, it also unveiled its celebrity AI chatbots, available on Messenger and WhatsApp. It's training Llama 3 now, Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg is on a quest to achieve even smarter AI technology — called AGI, or artificial general intelligence, by some experts. The CEO hasn't defined what that looks like just yet, or indeed when it'll arrive, according to The Verge, but sees its eventual arrival as a gradual process.
"I'm not actually that sure that some specific threshold will feel that profound."
Meta didn't immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment ahead of publication. Nvidia declined to comment.
Despite ongoing semiconductor shortages in 2023, things may be looking up for tech buyers this year.
Last September, Microsoft's chief technology officer Kevin Scott said that the tech company is finding it easier to get hold of Nvidia's chips, CNBC reported.
Still, Zuckerberg said that Meta's current arsenal of Nvidia AI chips may spell trouble for other companies who want to cash in on the hype.
"We have built up the capacity to do this at a scale that may be larger than any other individual company," he told The Verge. "I think a lot of people may not appreciate that."
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