Facebook Plans to Build Its Own Chips as Part of Hardware Push

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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