After twitter & uber, meta joins Arm-based cloud infra club

Image credit: Arm

It is still to occur to me that someone I am familiar with call ‘twitter’ anything other than twitter. It is probably only the tech journalists who mention that arbitrary letter to refer to twitter. On the other hand, ‘Meta’ is more adopted across financial world possibly because it was introduced as an umbrella term for a group of communication platforms. Anyway, twitter embraced a multi-architecture infrastructure back in 2020 with the adoption of graviton2 based AWS EC2 instances for its’ timeline. Back in 2023, uber migrated part of its infrastructure on OCI Arm-based(Ampere Altra?) infrastructure. If the recent report by Financial Times holds true, Meta is going to have their first custom-built Arm-based chip unveiled on this summer.

Company	Arm Chip Procured	year
twitter	AWS Graviton	2020
Uber	Ampere Computing	2023
Meta	custom	2025*

*tentative

twitter timeline- powered by Arm-based graviton series

Cambridge, England based ARM Holdings has its’ presence in almost every smartphone and embedded systems. Softbank owned Arm designs CPU cores that implement ARM architecture family of instruction set. However, for this particular chip, Arm is making an exception. This time Arm is making an in-house chip, instead of design. It will also put Arm in direct competition with some of its customers. But SoftBank’s founder Masyoshi Son wants to put Arm at the center of his AI infrastructure vision. The current wave of breathtaking AI models require humongous compute for training and inference. Arm based chips, which are known for better power/performance ratio can come as an alternative for efficient inference. And, the ever growing datacenter demand might open new avenues for efficient Arm-based cloud chips.

Arm Holdings PLC stock

Arm shares jumped 6% on the news of this deal.