Meta is moving to design and build its own artificial-intelligence chips, reducing its reliance on outside suppliers.
According to reporting surfaced by Yahoo Finance and others, the company plans to begin producing a new AI chip called "Iris" in September. MSN reports that Meta intends to stand up a manufacturing unit for the chips by September 2026, with a goal of boosting its computing power to 14 gigawatts by 2027. The Iris chip is described as part of Meta's MTIA (Meta Training and Inference Accelerator) program.
The move fits a broader industry trend: the biggest technology companies increasingly want custom silicon tailored to their own AI workloads, rather than buying every processor off the shelf. Designing chips in-house can lower costs and give a company more control over performance as it scales up data centers.
Investors are already reacting. According to Barron's, shares of chip-equipment makers Applied Materials and Lam Research rose on news of Meta's plans, since a company building more of its own chips means more demand for the machines used to manufacture them.
The reaction to Meta's own stock has been less rosy. Investor's Business Daily notes that even as Meta takes what it calls a "big step" toward its AI chip ambitions, the company's stock was falling.
Why it matters: if Meta succeeds in making its own AI chips at scale, it could reshape who profits from the AI boom — shifting spending away from traditional chip vendors and toward the equipment suppliers and cloud infrastructure that power it.