Meta commits to 1 gigawatt of custom chips with Broadcom as Hock Tan decides to leave board

In this articleMeta and Broadcom on Tuesday announced a sweeping deal that extends an existing partnership between the two companies for the design of Meta's custom in-house AI accelerators through 2029. At the same time, Meta said Broadcom's CEO, Hock Tan, told Meta last week that he has decided not to stand for reelection to Meta's board, according to a filing. Tan joined Meta's board in 2024.Meta has committed to an initial deployment of 1 gigawatt of its Training and Inference Accelerators according to a statement. The deal will eventually see Meta deploying multiple gigawatts of chips based on Broadcom technology.The MTIA chips will be the first AI silicon to use a 2 nanometer process, Broadcom said in its own statement."Meta is partnering with Broadcom across chip design, packaging, and networking to build out the massive computing foundation we need to deliver personal superintelligence to billions of people," Meta's co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, was quoted as saying in the statement.Broadcom shares rose 3% in extended trading after the announcement. Meta stock was flat."Now, contrary to recent analyst reports, Meta's custom accelerator, MTIA roadmap is alive and well. We're shipping now and, in fact, for the next generation XPUs, we will scale to multiple gigawatts in 2027 and beyond," Tan said on Broadcom's March earnings call.Meta unveiled four new versions of its in-house MTIA chips in March. It first unveiled the custom silicon in 2023, following on the heels of similar chip programs at Google and Amazon.Hyperscalers are seeking alternatives to the costly, constrained graphics processing units from Nvidia and AMD, as they hustle to power AI data centers. They're making GPU alternatives called application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, that are smaller and cheaper than the general-purpose AI workhorse GPUs, but are limited to performing a narrower set of tasks.Google was first to the custom ASIC game, releasing its first Tensor Processing Unit in 2015. Amazon was next, with its first custom chip announced in 2018. While these tech giants incorporate their AI chips as part of their respective cloud computing platforms so customers can access them, Meta's MTIA chips are used entirely for internal purposes.The deal comes two weeks after Broadcom announced a long-term agreement with Google for producing its TPUs, and said Anthropic would access 3.5 gigawatts worth of the in-house Google chip.Broadcom shares are up 10% so far in 2026, while the S&P 500 index has gained about 2% over the same period.Tracey Travis, who last year retired from her position as Estée Lauder's finance chief, will leave Meta's board after taking a board seat in 2020, Meta said.Meta has made a flurry of deals since committing in January to spending up to $135 billion on AI this year as it tries to keep pace with its megacap peers as well as Anthropic and OpenAI.Meta's AI deals over the past couple months include commitments to deploy up to 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs, millions of Nvidia chips and new custom chips made by chip architecture firm Arm Holdings.Meta has plans for 31 data centers, including 27 in the U.S.Got a confidential news tip? We want to hear from you.Sign up for free newsletters and get more CNBC delivered to your inboxGet this delivered to your inbox, and more info about our products and services.© 2026 Versant Media, LLC.

All Rights Reserved. A Versant Media Company. Data is a real-time snapshot *Data is delayed at least 15 minutes. Global Business and Financial News, Stock Quotes, and Market Data and Analysis. Data also provided by