Summary: Meta, led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is investing billions in Nvidia’s H100 graphics cards to build a massive compute infrastructure for AI research and projects. By end of 2024, Meta aims to have 350,000 of these GPUs, with total expenditures potentially reaching $9 billion. This move is part of Meta’s focus on developing artificial general intelligence (AGI), competing with firms like OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind. The company’s AI and computing investments are a key part of its 2024 budget, emphasizing AI as their largest investment area.
“spend billions” does not equal “hand over cash and take home GPUs”. It’ll mean a contract worth that amount with delivery terms defined over time. Even over the course of a year there’s likely to be newer product than Lovelace.
When you get product you pay for it. Spending means paying for it. You may have a contract for future product, but you don’t pay for the future product in advance as SOX rules kick in. Commonly, a chip development cycle can be at least 10 months.