Facebook reportedly develops its own machine learning chip

Facebook is developing a machine learning chip to handle tasks such as recommending content to users, The Information reported on Thursday, citing two people familiar with the matter.

The company has also reportedly developed another chip for video transcoding to improve the experience of watching recorded and live videos on its apps.

According to people familiar with the matter, engineers who joined Facebook to engage in chip development initially focused on working with external chip companies to optimize current chip designs. For example, Facebook announced in 2019 that it was working with companies such as Intel, Qualcomm and Broadcom to develop semi-custom ASIC chips for inference and video transcoding to ensure that technical requirements are met in advance and performance and energy efficiency are improved.

Facebook is currently developing inference and video transcoding chips without any external company involvement. Sources said that in Facebook's data centers, the newly developed chips will be used together with semi-custom chips purchased from outside, rather than completely replacing the latter.

Sources familiar with Facebook's projects revealed that Facebook is also designing chips for personal computing devices such as Oculus virtual reality headsets. It is reported that Facebook has poached Shahriar Rabii, the former head of Google's chip design team, to be responsible for chip development in the fields of augmented reality and virtual reality. Earlier this year, Israeli media reported that Facebook plans to build a chip design center in Israel.