Rivos Inc. is a chip firm that Meta Platforms Inc. is purchasing.  The agreement is a component of Meta’s strategy to increase control over its AI infrastructure and fortify its own semiconductor research.  Rivos is developing a GPU of its own.  The majority of AI work is powered by a GPU.  According to a Bloomberg story, Meta already has an internal chip project named the Meta Training and Inference Accelerator.

Meta continues to invest billions on external GPUs.  Despite its internal efforts, Meta’s processors are largely sourced from industry leader Nvidia Corp.  The terms of the deal are not made public.  However, The Information reported in August that Rivos was soliciting fresh capital at a $2 billion valuation.

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Meta wants to reduce its dependency on Nvidia.  As it works toward its goal of “superintelligence”—AI that can do tasks on par with or better than humans—the business has been producing own AI inference chips to cut expenses and lessen its reliance on Nvidia.

For CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chip development is moving too slowly.  According to people with knowledge of the situation, leadership has been looking for outside assistance to speed up the work because Zuckerberg is unhappy with the pace.  The representative for Meta disagreed.  According to Bloomberg, the company indicated that “our custom silicon work is progressing quickly and this will further accelerate our efforts.”

Zuckerberg prioritized AI for the business.  To compete with OpenAI and Google (Alphabet Inc.), Meta is investing a lot of money on AI expertise and infrastructure.  This year, Meta intends to spend up to $72 billion.  AI infrastructure is part of this.  Recently, the business raised $29 billion to construct a huge data center in Louisiana.

This is not the first attempt to acquire a chip.  According to the Bloomberg article, earlier this year, Meta attempted to pay $800 million to acquire the Korean startup FuriosaAI, but the latter turned down the offer and chose to continue growing on its own.