Meta's new AI chips will begin production in September

What happened

Reuters obtained an internal Meta memo confirming the company will begin manufacturing its in-house AI chip Iris via TSMC in September 2026. The chip cleared bug-testing in approximately six weeks without significant issues.

Context and impact

Iris is part of Meta's MTIA (Meta Training and Inference Accelerators) program. The strategic goal is to reduce dependence on NVIDIA and AMD and handle the exponentially growing AI compute demands of Facebook, Instagram, and Meta AI. The Broadcom partnership extends through 2029.

Details

• Iris ASIC: optimized for ranking and recommendation systems (feeds, ads), not model training
• Partners: Broadcom (design), TSMC (manufacturing); future generations targeting 2nm process
• Capacity goal: 7 GW (2026) to 14 GW (2027)
• Supply chain: RAM from Samsung, storage from Sandisk, fiber-optics from Sumitomo Electric
• Context: Meta also developing LLM Watermelon (matching GPT-5.5 benchmarks) and Muse Spark 1.1