Meta to put its Iris AI chip into production in September

What the Iris chip is

Iris is part of a four-generation project under Meta's Training and Inference Accelerators program, known as MTIA, which the company is designing in-house to power the AI systems behind Facebook and Instagram.

Meta unveiled four new MTIA chips in March, the 300, 400, 450, and 500, and said it would ship new versions on a roughly six-month cadence rather than the annual pace common across the industry.

The MTIA 300 is already in production for ranking and recommendation work, while the 450 and 500, aimed at generative image and video inference, are slated for mass deployment through 2027.

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Testing and manufacturing partners

Testing on the chip took only six weeks and found no major issues, according to an internal memo reviewed by Reuters. Meta is working with Broadcom to help design the chip and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co to manufacture it.

Meta is also sourcing RAM from Samsung, storage from Sandisk, and fiber-optic equipment from Sumitomo Electric for its broader infrastructure buildout. Broadcom's partnership with Meta now runs through 2029 and covers several generations of custom silicon, with newer MTIA parts expected to be among the first custom AI chips built on a 2-nanometre process.

Why Meta is building its own silicon

The plan calls for deploying seven gigawatts of computing infrastructure this year and doubling that to 14 gigawatts in 2027, with Meta expecting to spend as much as $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year. The push comes as Meta looks to lower its GPU costs amid an unprecedented component shortage affecting the wider industry.