A typical tape-out costs tens of millions of dollars and takes roughly three to six months to complete, with no guarantee the test will succeed. A failure would require Meta to diagnose the problem and repeat the tape-out step.
Meta and TSMC declined to comment.
The chip is the latest in the company's Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) series. The program has had a wobbly start for years and at one point scrapped a chip at a similar phase of development.
However, Meta last year started using an MTIA chip to perform inference, or the process involved in running an AI system as users interact with it, for the recommendation systems that determine which content shows up on Facebook and Instagram news feeds.