Meta Platforms has hired an Oslo-based team that was working on artificial intelligence networking technology at British semiconductor startup Graphcore until late last year.
In response to a request for comment, a Meta spokeswoman verified the hirings after Reuters found 10 persons whose LinkedIn accounts stated they worked for Graphcore until December 2022 or January 2023 and then joined Meta in February or March of this year.
“We recently welcomed a number of highly-specialized engineers in Oslo to our infrastructure team at Meta. They bring deep expertise in the design and development of supercomputing systems to support AI and machine learning at scale in Meta’s data centers,” Jon Carvill, the Meta spokesperson said.
The move brings additional muscle to the social media giant’s bid to improve how its data centers handle AI work, as it races to cope with demand for AI-oriented infrastructure from teams across the company looking to build new features.
Reuters, Meta already has an in-house team building various types of chips geared at speeding up and maximizing efficiency for its AI work, including a network chip that performs a sort of air traffic management role for servers.
Graphcore, one of the UK’s most valued tech businesses, was formerly viewed as a promising prospective competitor to Nvidia’s dominating dominance in the market for AI chip systems by investors such as Microsoft and venture capital firm Sequoia.
However, it suffered a setback in 2020 when Microsoft canceled an early agreement to purchase Graphcore’s chips for its Azure cloud computing platform, according to The Times.
Microsoft employed Nvidia GPUs to power the huge infrastructure that powers ChatGPT developer OpenAI.
