The five-year deal involves Meta buying 10% of the chip company, a similar arrangement to a partnership between OpenAI and AMD last year

The owner of Facebook has agreed to buy $60 billion of artificial intelligence chips from the US semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices – despite fears about the vast sums committed to AI infrastructure projects.

It is one more massive deal in a year in which US tech companies are expected to spend $660 billion on AI assets, and may represent part of a broader pivot in Meta’s AI strategy, said Alvin Nguyen, an analyst at Forrester.

The five-year deal involves Meta buying 10% of the chip company, a similar arrangement to a partnership between OpenAI and AMD last year.

Both deals underscore an appetite among leading AI players to diversify their chip supplies beyond the offerings of Nvidia, AMD’s larger rival, said Nguyen. The shift reflects supply chain bottlenecks at Nvidia.

Meta has separately struck a deal with Nvidia to buy millions of AI chips. Meta has been in discussions with Google about using the company’s tensor processors (TPUs) for AI work, Reuters reported.

OpenAI had to go multi-vendor because they got to a size where being locked in with just Nvidia limits their growth, said Nguyen. Meta is already big enough where it needs multiple options.

AMD would supply 6GW worth of chips to Meta, starting with 1GW of the company’s forthcoming MI450 hardware in the second half of this year, said AMD’s chief executive, Lisa Su.

Meta invested vast sums into its own AI research last year, embarking on a talent spending spree in which the social media company attempted to poach top employees from its rival – at times with $100 million signing bonuses.

This appeared to slow after widely reported fears of an AI bubble. Now, said Nguyen, Meta seems to be differentiating its strategy: pivoting away from competing with rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic, and toward datacentres and other AI infrastructure.

They seem to have shifted to, ‘We want to host AI infrastructure for you’. Not that they’re not a player, but they’re not the major player (in the AI race), said Nguyen.

This deal with AMD may help it to do that; so too will its massive datacentre under construction in Louisiana, estimated to cost $27 billion.

In addition to buying AMD’s flagship graphics chips (GPUs), Meta also plans to buy central processors (CPUs), including a variant that will be customised for the social media platform’s needs.

The custom CPU would be tuned to deliver powerful performance while keeping energy consumption as low as possible, Su said. The deal will include two generations of AMD’s CPUs. Meta is making a big bet on AMD.