AWS is a multi-billion dollar AI infrastructure partner with Meta

Amazon Web Services Inc. entered into a multi-year supply contract with Meta Platforms Inc. and cloud infrastructure.

Bloomberg report today the deal is worth billions of dollars.

The deal focuses on AWS’ Graviton family of internally developed central processing units. According to the company, Meta will buy access to tens of millions of Graviton cores with the option to add more down the line. It will use chips to power artificial intelligence agents.

AWS debuted the newest addition to the Graviton chip line, the Graviton5, last December. It includes 192 cores made using a 3 nanometer manufacturing process. The cores use Arm Holdings plc’s instruction set architecture, or ISA.

The chip’s ISA defines the language in which it expresses calculations. The “words” that make up language are simple computing operations such as arithmetic operations. Arm’s ISA also includes matrix and vector extensions, calculations optimized for AI workloads.

AWS says Graviton5 is 25% faster than its old custom CPU. One of the contributors to the speed of the chip is that its L3 cache is 5 times larger. The L3 cache is a memory pool that stores bits around the processor cores. Reducing the distance between two sets of circuits reduces the time it takes for data to travel between them, which speeds up processing.

CPUs perform various tasks in AI clusters. They link graphics cards that do a lot of the math involved in running a neural network. Additionally, AI agents like those Meta plans to operate on Graviton5 can use CPUs to power their tools. Those are third-party applications that the agent uses to automate tasks.

Graviton5 is designed to work with a collection of hardware and software modules called the AWS Nitro System. It offloads certain infrastructure management tasks from CPUs to specialized accelerators, leaving more computing capacity for customer applications.

Public cloud operators often use a single set of infrastructure assets to power the workloads of multiple customers. Those workloads are isolated from each other to reduce cyber security risks. According to AWS, Graviton5 uses a module called the Nitro Isolation Engine to ensure that the workloads of different users are truly isolated from each other.

“AWS has been a trusted cloud partner for years, and expanding to Graviton allows us to run the CPU-intensive work behind agent AI with the performance and efficiency we need at our scale,” said Meta’s head of infrastructure Santosh Janardhan.

The partnership is the second major deal CPU parent Facebook has unveiled in the past month. It’s still ahead he agreed to welcome Arm’s newly released AGI CPU, a 136-core processor optimized for AI servers. In addition, Meta plans to help the company design many future iterations of the chip.

Image: AWS