Facebook Plans to Build Its Own Chips as Part of Hardware Push
April 18 2018 - 8:21PM
Dow Jones News
By Deepa Seetharaman
Facebook Inc. is planning to design chips that could be used in
its consumer devices, artificial-intelligence software and data
centers, according to a person familiar with the matter and recent
job listings.
The effort is part of the social-media company's nascent push to
develop more of its own hardware.
The project to design custom chips, still in its early stages,
could give Facebook greater control over the design and development
of its various hardware projects under way, which include connected
speakers and virtual-reality headsets, the person said.
Other tech giants have gone the same route, including Alphabet
Inc.'s Google, which developed its own microprocessor chips to
advance its work in artificial intelligence, search ranking and
other features. In 2009, Apple Inc. launched its own chip-making
effort to boost the power and efficiency of its devices.
Hardware is still unfamiliar territory for Facebook, whose core
strength is in developing software services like its social network
used by more than two billion people a month. Facebook's launch two
years ago of its first consumer device, the Oculus Rift
virtual-reality goggles, ran into shipping problems as well as
rising competition from HTC Corp. and Sony Corp.
Last year, Facebook promoted one of its top executives, Andrew
Bosworth, to oversee all of its hardware efforts, including its
cutting-edge unit Building 8, as well as Oculus VR and augmented
and virtual reality. In 2012, Mr. Bosworth was tapped to helped
expand Facebook's then-shaky mobile-ad business, and his move to
hardware last year signaled the company's intention to invest more
seriously in consumer devices.
Recent job listings show that Facebook is looking for engineers
with experience building different types of chips from scratch.
Bloomberg earlier reported Facebook's plans.
Facebook is looking for engineers with experience designing
"semi-custom and fully custom" ASICs, or application-specific
integrated circuits, which are processors built for a specific
purpose. Facebook is also seeking experts in chips called field
programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs, that are used in large data
centers.
The jobs fall under Facebook's infrastructure division, led by
longtime executive Jay Parikh, and those engineers will work with
employees to advance Facebook's work in artificial intelligence,
machine learning and consumer devices.
In a Twitter post on Wednesday, Facebook's director of AI
research, Yann LeCun, flagged that the company was looking to hire
chip-design engineers for AI at its Menlo Park, Calif.
headquarters. "I used to be a chip designer many moons ago," Mr.
LeCun noted.
Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 18, 2018 20:06 ET (00:06 GMT)
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