Facebook Hiring Engineers to Build Its Own Processors

Facebook is putting together a team of experts to help design its own set of semiconductors for use in its own devices.

As Bloomberg reports, although there has been no public confirmation that Facebook intends to design its own chips, a new job listing on the company’s careers portal suggests it’s happening.

According to the job listing, Facebook is seeking to hire a manager to create an “end-to-end SoC/ASIC, firmware and driver development organization.” This implies the company is still in the early stages of such a plan.

“The role involves evaluating, developing and driving next-generation technologies within Facebook. The candidate would need to work with software and system engineers to understand limitations of current hardware and use their expertise to build custom solutions targeted at multiple verticals including AI/ML, compression, and video encoding,” the posting said.

It seems like Facebook wants someone onboard to help it create processors and chipsets that can be used for machine learning and artificial intelligence purposes, something the social media giant is quite interested in.

A Facebook-designed chip would give the company “finer control over product development and would be able to better tune its software and hardware together,” Bloomberg noted. Facebook could use the chips to operate hardware devices, artificial intelligence software and servers at its data centers.

Given how widely Facebook uses AI within the company, building its own AI chips seems like a natural progression.