The owner of Facebook has agreed to buy $60bn (£44.5bn) 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 $660bn 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 California 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, the world’s largest chipmaker.
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 are already big enough where they need 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 $100m 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 $27bn.
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.” she added.
While AMD’s market share is far smaller than its main rival’s, Nguyen said the chipmaker was a good bet – its chips perform as well, and in some ways better – and the company offers technologies that allow Nvidia workloads to be converted to run on its systems. He expected that AI companies might also eventually diversify to other chipmakers, such as Intel.
Meta planned to continue to buy chips from other vendors and develop its in-house processors at the same time, said Santosh Janardhan, the company’s infrastructure head.
The scale at which Meta was building datacentres and infrastructure required multiple chip vendors and approaches, he said.
“All of the chipmakers end up having sort of a seat at the table,” Janardhan added.
Meta’s bet on AMD comes as new agentic AI tools have rattled markets and caused a selloff in software stocks, over fears of AI leading to widespread job displacement.
This is likely to continue. The AI company Anthropic announced on Tuesday that it will launch a plugin to allow one of its tools, Claude Cowork, to be more seamlessly integrated into workflows, connecting to Google Drive, Gmail, DocuSign and others.
The plugin is part of a broader effort by the company to capitalise on its momentum in selling its product to enterprise consumers, a hotly contested market at the moment in which OpenAI and Google are also vying for share.
It will make Anthropic’s agentic tool “more accessible and much more ready for anyone to be able to use”, said Kate Jensen, head of Americas at Anthropic.
Originally written by: Aisha Down
Source: The Guardian
Published on: 24 February 2026
Link to original article: Meta agrees $60bn deal with chipmaker AMD despite AI bubble fears
