Broadcom’s Facebook friend will help train it to accelerate AI workloads

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Apr 17, 20262 mins

Broadcom will provide the networking backbone to support Meta’s in-house AI chips.

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A partnership between Broadcom and Meta could benefit other datacenter operators, as the networking company hones its expertise for supporting AI development.

Meta is developing its own in-house AI chips for its exclusive use, and has extended an agreement with Broadcom to support that infrastructure, an agreement that will also provide Broadcom with the know-how to ramp up its expertise in AI networking.

The two companies will couple logic, memory, and high-speed I/O for current deployment, and establish a blueprint for future iterations of the Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) chips.

As part of the agreement, Broadcom is deploying its Ethernet-based backbone to scale up compute within MTIA racks. Its enhanced network capacity is designed to eliminate network congestion, even under the most intensive AI workloads.

“This initial MTIA deployment is just the beginning of a sustained, multi-generation roadmap to serve the trajectory of massive growth over the next few years highlighting Broadcom’s unmatched leadership in AI networking and the power of our foundational XPU custom accelerator platform,” Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said, according to a company news release.

Broadcom has been busy polishing its AI credentials. Just last week, it signed agreements with Anthropic to develop a new generation of AI chips, and with Google to boost its infrastructure for AI development.

Maxwell Cooter

Maxwell began writing about technology in 1984, when mainframes ruled the world. Since then he has written for just about every business computing title in the UK, and for a few in the US, covering everything from Artificial intelligence to Zero-day exploits and all points in between. He has also been editor-in-chief of several award-winning titles, including Network Week, Techworld, and Cloud Pro, and a regular contributor to Whatsonstage.com. In his spare time he coaches a junior rugby team.

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