Meta Recruited AI Experts from Graphcore: Boosting Data Center Tech

Meta has recently recruited a professional team skilled in developing artificial intelligence network technologies for Graphcore, a British semiconductor startup, with at least ten individuals joining Meta between February and March of this year.

Established in 2016, Graphcore was founded by Simon Knowles and Nigel Toon, garnering investments from Microsoft and Sequoia Capital and even being perceived as a competitor to NVIDIA in the realm of artificial intelligence development.

However, Microsoft subsequently abandoned the integration of Graphcore C2 IPU within its Azure cloud services platform, opting instead for NVIDIA products as cloud service applications and AI acceleration tools, adversely impacting Graphcore’s investments.

The expert team members poached by Meta have now joined Meta’s infrastructure team based in Austin, Texas, with the anticipation of assisting in the design of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies for data centers.

Prior to this, Meta had already employed AI and machine learning technologies extensively within services such as Facebook and Instagram, including malicious content filtering, illegal content removal, and prohibition, as well as content recommendations and ad placements.

As auto-generative AI technologies become increasingly prevalent, Meta plans to expand its content market using similar techniques, thereby driving further service usage and, in turn, generating revenue through ad exposure.

Nevertheless, Meta has not disclosed the specific research and development projects for which the newly recruited technical personnel are responsible. However, it has been reported that Meta internally designed several chips for accelerating AI computational performance, including a chip for optimizing server data transmission traffic and another for AI model training and inference, anticipated for deployment in 2025.