Meta and Amazon join forces for explosive agentic AI push with Graviton chips

The deployment will begin with tens of millions of Graviton cores, with the flexibility to expand further as Meta’s AI capabilities continue to grow.

The deal highlights a major shift in how AI infrastructure is being built. While GPUs remain essential for training large models, the rapid rise of agentic AI is driving massive demand for CPU-intensive workloads such as real-time reasoning, code generation, search, and orchestrating complex multi-step tasks.

AWS’s Graviton5 processors are specifically designed for these workloads, giving Meta the computing power needed to run them efficiently and at scale.

The chips will support a wide range of Meta operations, including its expanding AI initiatives. These systems require infrastructure capable of handling billions of interactions while coordinating sophisticated, multi-step agent workflows—exactly the kind of CPU-intensive work Graviton is designed for.

The Graviton5 chip features 192 cores and a cache that is five times larger than the previous generation, reducing delays in core-to-core communication by up to 33%. This enables faster data processing and greater bandwidth, both critical for agentic AI systems that continuously reason through and execute complex tasks.

Graviton is built on the AWS Nitro System, which combines dedicated hardware and software to deliver high performance, availability, and security. The Nitro System enables bare-metal instances for direct hardware access while maintaining familiar Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) devices, allowing Meta to run its own virtual machines without performance compromises.

The Graviton5 instance range also supports the Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), enabling low-latency, high-bandwidth communication between instances. This is essential for Meta’s large-scale AI workloads, where tasks must be distributed across multiple processors working in coordination.

“This isn't just about chips; it's about giving customers the infrastructure foundation, as well as data and inference services, to build AI that understands, anticipates, and scales efficiently to billions of people worldwide,” said Nafea Bshara, Vice President and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon.

“Meta's expanded partnership, deploying tens of millions of Graviton cores, shows what happens when you combine purpose-built silicon with the full AWS AI stack to power the next generation of agentic AI,” he added.

Santosh Janardhan, Head of Infrastructure at Meta, said, “As we scale the infrastructure behind Meta's AI ambitions, diversifying our compute sources is a strategic imperative. AWS has been a trusted cloud partner for years, and expanding to Graviton allows us to run the CPU-intensive workloads behind agentic AI with the performance and efficiency we need at our scale.”

Meta Layoffs

The deal comes at a time when Meta is planning to lay off roughly 10% of its workforce—around 8,000 employees—joining the growing list of major companies cutting jobs amid the rising influence of artificial intelligence.

The company is also set to close nearly 6,000 open roles, according to a memo by Janelle Gale, Meta’s Chief People Officer, published by Bloomberg and confirmed by CNN.

The layoffs are expected to take effect on May 20.

“We’re doing this as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making,” Gale wrote in the memo.