Arm joins forces with Meta to power the next wave of AI innovation

 Semiconductor designer Arm is teaming up with Meta to strengthen the social media giant’s growing artificial intelligence systems — a move that comes as Meta undergoes one of the largest infrastructure expansions in its history.

Under this new partnership, Meta will shift its ranking and recommendation engines — the core of what powers feeds across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads — to Arm’s Neoverse platform, which has recently been fine-tuned for cloud-based AI workloads.

“AI is transforming how people connect and create,” said Santosh Janardhan, Meta’s head of infrastructure. “Working with Arm helps us scale that innovation efficiently to more than 3 billion people who use Meta’s apps every day.”

Arm, best known for the chip designs that power billions of smartphones, is stepping deeper into the AI and data center world. While it has often been overshadowed by giants like Nvidia, Arm is betting big on its strength in energy-efficient computing — a key factor as AI models grow ever larger and more power-hungry.

“The next era of AI will be defined by efficiency at scale,” said Rene Haas, CEO of Arm. “With Meta, we’re combining Arm’s performance-per-watt advantage with their AI expertise to push the boundaries of what’s possible.”

The partnership comes as Meta pours billions into expanding its global data center network. Two of its flagship projects — “Prometheus” in Ohio and “Hyperion” in Louisiana — are designed to deliver a combined multi-gigawatt computing capacity by the end of the decade. Prometheus, powered in part by a 200-megawatt natural gas plant, is slated to go online in 2027, while construction on Hyperion’s 2,250-acre campus is expected to continue through 2030.

Notably, this deal isn’t about buying stakes or merging assets — unlike many recent AI tie-ups. Instead, it’s a pure technology partnership focused on combining Arm’s hardware efficiency with Meta’s massive AI workloads.

Meanwhile, the broader AI hardware race continues to heat up. Nvidia has pledged more than $100 billion in phased investments across major AI labs like OpenAI and xAI, while AMD is supplying OpenAI with 6 gigawatts of computing capacity and offering stock options worth up to 10% of its company as part of the deal.