Meta Platforms (FB +0.58%) recently announced that it has teamed up with NVIDIA (NVDA +1.80%) to create one of the world's fastest computers. But the move is more than just an attempt to capture first place in a hardware competition with rivals.
In this video from "The Virtual Opportunities Show", recorded on Jan. 25, Fool contributor Jose Najarro explains some real-world applications of supercomputing power on Meta's business, including advertising, language translation, and the user experience.
Jose Najarro: Yesterday, January 24th, Meta Platforms, also known as Facebook, introduced their next-generation artificial intelligence supercomputer. Everybody must be wondering, why is Facebook using some form of supercomputer? What do they need these supercomputers for?
It's on their newsroom, so if anybody wants to read about it. Meta Platforms has a newsroom where they share a lot of great information, but the reason a social platform needs some form of supercomputer, they use it for the following: to help translate text from different languages.
You want to do that super quick, so the supercomputer is used for that. The second thing is, they have an AI that's currently learning about harmful content or potentially harmful content, so they're using supercomputers for that. They need stronger supercomputers. More users, more, I'm guessing, hateful or harmful content to be reviewed, so they need figure process for that. The other thing is, obviously Facebook is such a huge advertising platform. It helps select, hey, this is the ad that Rachel might have the better returns with, this is the ad Jose might click on more often.
Artificial intelligence is used a lot in this market. What I thought was pretty interesting is, this is a supercomputer built by one of my favorite markets companies out there, Nvidia. Nvidia is powering this supercomputer. This is not the first time Meta Platforms has chosen Nvidia for supercomputer.
Back in 2017, they chose this company to create one of their supercomputers. What I think is super interesting is, right now, the supercomputer is being powered by 6,000 graphics cards from Nvidia, and that's an insane number, especially as probably Demitri is going to mention a little bit more about some chip industry markets, but that's a huge amount of chips being used in this supercomputer, and it's not done yet, this is just Phase 1.
By the end of Phase 2, which they expect to be later this year, from 6,000 graphics cards, it's going to go to 16,000 GPUs, and Meta believes this will be the fastest supercomputer in the market, and that's insane. There's a lot of supercomputers in the world right now, so saying that once it's complete, it's going to be the top one, I think it's pretty interesting news.
