Nvidia has signed a multiyear agreement with Meta Platforms to sell the social media giant millions of its current and future artificial intelligence chips. The deal spans Nvidia’s latest Blackwell accelerators and its forthcoming Rubin artificial intelligence chips, positioning Meta to access multiple generations of Nvidia’s data center hardware. Nvidia did not disclose a value for the deal, but characterized it as a broad commitment to both existing and next-wave architectures for artificial intelligence workloads.
The arrangement also includes standalone deployments of Nvidia’s Grace and Vera central processing units, which are based on technology from Arm Holdings. Nvidia initially introduced these Arm-based processors in 2023 as companions to its artificial intelligence accelerators, but is now explicitly targeting them at emerging use cases such as running artificial intelligence agents. The company also aims to push Grace and Vera into more conventional technical computing markets, including back-end tasks such as running databases and high-intensity data processing operations in data centers. Nvidia executives described Vera as the next step in a roadmap focused on energy-efficient, data center-only CPUs for demanding workloads.
The deal comes as Meta is simultaneously developing its own artificial intelligence chips and holding talks with Google about using Tensor Processing Unit chips, or TPUs, for artificial intelligence work. Ian Buck, general manager of Nvidia’s hyperscale and high-performance computing unit, said that Nvidia’s Grace processors have shown they can use half the power for some common tasks such as running databases, and that further efficiency gains are expected with Vera. He said Meta has already tested Vera on selected workloads and that the results look very promising. While Nvidia has not broken out sales to Meta, it is widely believed that Meta is among four customers that made up 61% of Nvidia’s revenue in its most recent fiscal quarter, and analysts see the announcement as a signal that Nvidia is retaining a large share of Meta’s business while gaining traction for its central processor products.
