Meta reportedly inks $10B+ cloud deal with Google – News

Meta Platforms Inc. has reportedly signed a cloud deal with Google LLC that will be worth more than $10 billion over six years.

Sources told Reuters on Thursday that the agreement encompasses servers, storage, networking and “other services.” The deal comes weeks after Meta announced plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on artificial intelligence infrastructure. As part of the project, the Facebook parent will build a network of data centers that are each expected to consume multiple gigawatts of power.

If the agreement with Google is intended to support Meta’s AI efforts, a sizable portion of the $10 billion budget could go toward machine learning accelerators. The Alphabet Inc. unit offers both Nvidia Corp. graphics cards and custom AI chips.

Google’s latest internally developed AI accelerator, Ironwood, debuted in April. It offers double the performance per watt of its predecessor. The speed increase is partly the result of upgrades to the onboard memory. According to Google, its engineers expanded the processor’s HBM pool sixfold and more than quadrupled the speed at which it can retrieve data for AI models.

Ironwood is deployed in clusters with up to 9,216 chips. The accelerators exchange data using a custom interconnect, the Inter-Chip Interconnect, that Google says is 50% faster than the one it developed for its previous-generation AI chips.

Google Cloud also offers Nvidia’s latest Blackwell B200 graphics cards. In February, the company debuted an instance series that combines 72 B200 chips with 32 central processing units. The underlying servers are supported by custom liquid cooling equipment. A Google-developed network adapter, Titanium ML, processes traffic between instances.

Meta previously inked cloud agreements with Amazon Web Services Inc. in 2021 and Microsoft Corp. in 2022. When the deals were announced, the Facebook parent stated that it was planning to use the companies’ public clouds to support its AI research. The Azure contract gave it access to 5,400 Nvidia graphics cards.

Meta’s cloud partnerships with AWS and Microsoft both included joint engineering initiatives. In particular, it teamed up with the companies to optimize PyTorch for their respective public clouds. PyTorch is a popular open-source AI development tool that Meta released in 2016.

It’s unclear whether the reported deal with Google includes a similar engineering collaboration. The Alphabet Inc. unit is the creator of TensorFlow, the most popular open-source alternative to PyTorch. It’s also Meta’s largest competitor in the online advertising market.

The reports about the companies’ cloud deal come a few weeks after rumors emerged that OpenAI has also agreed to rent infrastructure from Google. It’s unclear how much the ChatGPT developer’s contract was worth. In March, CoreWeave Inc. announced a five-year cloud infrastructure agreement with OpenAI that will be worth up to $11.9 billion.

Image: Google