Meta claims custom chips will reduce costs and energy use compared to Nvidia

Meta is betting that building its own silicon can meaningfully undercut the cost and energy footprint of relying on Nvidia’s GPUs. The company’s custom Meta Training and Inference Accelerator chips, known as MTIA, are already in production, and Meta has laid out a roadmap spanning four generations that it plans to roll out at a pace the semiconductor industry rarely attempts. The headline numbers are eye-catching: a 44% reduction in total cost of ownership and 40% improvement in power efficiency compared to general-purpose Nvidia GPUs, at least for the specific workloads Meta is targeting. Those workloads include ranking and recommendation systems, ad optimization, and generative AI inference, which collectively represent the engine room of Meta’s business. Four generations in rapid succession Meta unveiled its roadmap for the MTIA 300, 400, 450, and 500 chip generations back in March. The MTIA 300 is already running in production environments, handling the inference tasks that power everything from your Instagram feed to the ads you see on Facebook. The next chip in line, codenamed Iris (also called the MTIA 400), is scheduled to enter production in September 2026 after clearing i...