Meta Platforms (META) – More Semiconductor News & Piper Sandler Survey Data – April 13, 2024
More Semiconductor News
While Nvidia’s chipsets will power a large chunk of Meta’s next-gen data center and GenAI infrastructure, Meta’s Meta Training & Inference Accelerator (MTIA) AI will help vertically integrate semiconductor creation for certain use cases. Just like Amazon… just like Google… just like Apple. These use cases for Meta include its advertising and discovery algorithms, which are quite unique workloads. That uniqueness makes internal design and manufacturing a more rational move, given Meta can create them precisely for the unique features it needs. Per the team, the process is more efficient than delegating to a 3rd party.
The potential use cases are expanding with the second version of MTIA AI chips announced this past week. The new chipset can handle more advanced recommendation and targeting workloads, along with unlocking “new experiences,” with better efficiency and performance (so lower cost). It plans to continue investing more aggressively here in the coming years to optimize efficiency of its tech stack and enable more seamless, flexible scaling. Early success is emboldening its approach despite Meta’s massive orders for Nvidia’s advanced chips. MTIA version 2 is now live in Meta’s data centers and is being used by developers to build new models and applications with the firm.
Piper Sandler Data
So teens in the U.S. don’t use Facebook anymore, right? Right? Not so fast. Facebook monthly usage among teens rose to 32% and set a 4 year high in Piper’s data release from this week. It attributes this to improving advertising products and discovery algorithms.
Instagram saw its largest rise in favorite app preference since TikTok debuted with 7 points of additional share Y/Y. It’s now the 2nd favorite teen app behind TikTok as it passed a struggling Snapchat. Piper called time spent trends there “encouraging.” It remains the most used app in the U.S. with its lead growing from 5 pts to 8 pts Y/Y.
In other Meta news, Piper Sandler’s advertising channel checks were quite positive and led to it raising estimates from Q2-Q4 by about 1%.
