Feb 26 (Reuters) – Meta Platforms has signed a multibillion-dollar deal to lease artificial intelligence chips from Google to develop new artificial intelligence models, The Information reported on Thursday, citing a person involved in the negotiations.
The report on the multi-year deal comes as companies are pouring billions of dollars into chips and artificial intelligence infrastructure to meet the demand for artificial intelligence.
Meta and Google declined Reuters’ requests for comment.
Earlier this week, Advanced Micro Devices said it would sell up to $60 billion in artificial intelligence chips to Meta. The Facebook owner also signed a deal with Nvidia earlier this month to buy its current and future artificial intelligence chips.
Reuters reported in December that Google was promoting its tensor processing unit (TPU) as a viable alternative to Nvidia’s market-leading GPUs. TPU sales have become an important growth engine for Google Cloud revenue as the company tries to prove to investors that its artificial intelligence investments are paying off.
The Information reported on Thursday that Meta is also in talks with Google to purchase TPUs for its data centers as early as next year, although the progress of those discussions has not yet been determined.
The report added that Google also signed an agreement with an unidentified large investment firm to provide funding for a joint venture that will lease TPU to other customers.
(Reporting by Fabiola Arámburo in Mexico City; Editing by Maju Samuel and Sherry Jacob-Phillips)
