Meta has reportedly hired at least ten AI experts from British startup Graphcore to join its infrastructure team in Oslo, Texas. The engineers are expected to help Meta develop AI and machine learning technologies for its data centres.
Meta’s spokesperson, Jon Carvill, confirmed the hiring, saying that the company recently welcomed highly specialized engineers from Oslo to its infrastructure team. The engineers bring deep expertise in the design and development of operating systems.
Graphcore, a chipmaker specializing in AI accelerators, was once seen as a competitor to NVIDIA in artificial intelligence. However, it had struggled to expand into US-based companies and was dealt a significant blow when Microsoft withdrew Graphcore’s Graphcore C2 IPU from its Azure cloud service platform and instead used NVIDIA products as cloud service applications and AI acceleration tools. Graphcore has also closed its Oslo office as part of a broader restructuring announced last October.
Meta’s move to hire Graphcore’s AI experts is part of its plan to expand its content market and increase traffic to its services using AI technology. The company already uses AI and machine learning technologies on services such as Facebook and Instagram to filter malicious content, remove or ban illegal content, recommend content, and place advertising content. With the growing popularity of auto-generated AI technology, Meta plans to leverage this technology to increase traffic to its services in exchange for exposure to advertising content.
Although Meta has not yet disclosed which R&D projects it has hired new technical staff for, sources say that the company is working to increase server data traffic to accelerate AI computing performance.
