Inference · Tom's Hardware
Meta's multi-billion-dollar Graviton deal highlights intensifying CPU shortages in AI infrastructure — the industry signals a shift to Agentic inference workloads, pushing demand
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Meta signed a multibillion-dollar, multi-year deal with Amazon Web Services last week to deploy tens of millions of Graviton5 CPU cores across AWS data centers, making Meta one of the five largest Graviton customers worldwide.
Key facts
- Amazon alone has guided to $200 billion, and Meta has set a range of $115 to $135 billion
- In terms of infrastructure spending, CreditSights projects that the top five hyperscalers will spend roughly $750 billion on capex in 2026, up around 67% year-over-year
- Server CPU prices have climbed 10% to 20% since March, with analysts expecting a further 8% to 10% increase in the second half of the year
- Graviton5, which AWS unveiled at re: Invent in December, packs 192 Arm Neoverse V3 cores on a 3nm process with roughly 180 MB of L3 cache, a fivefold increase over Graviton4
Summary
Meta already has GPU and accelerator contracts worth hundreds of billions across Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Google, CoreWeave, and Nebius, and it went to AWS specifically for general-purpose CPUs. Graviton5, which AWS unveiled at re: Invent in December, packs 192 Arm Neoverse V3 cores on a 3nm process with roughly 180 MB of L3 cache, a fivefold increase over Graviton4. The meteoric rise of agentic AI is driving notable shifts in CPU-to-GPU ratios. In its recent earnings call, Intel’s CFO David Zinsner said that the ratios of CPUs to GPUs in data centers have already moved from 1:8 to 1:4, adding that as workloads continue migrating towards inference and agentic AI, ratios could converge to 1:1 or even tilt further in favor of CPUs.