Meta and NVIDIA team up to lay out AI materials supply chain
Social media giant Meta and chip manufacturer Nvidia announced on Monday that they will jointly participate in a British AI startup's material discovery project to find new manufacturing materials for the semiconductor industry. The startup has previously received Investment support from founder Jeff Bezos and the British government. The startup, CuspAI, completed US$450 million in financing earlier this month, valuing it at US$2.6 billion. CuspAI uses artificial intelligence technology to simulate and screen the physical and chemical properties of new materials, which can significantly shorten the development cycle of traditional materials. The company announced on Monday the launch of a collaborative program called the "AI Materials Foundry," with both Nvidia and Meta's basic AI research teams joining the program. According to the cooperation framework, NVIDIA will provide CuspAI with large-scale GPU computing resources for running complex material simulation models. Meta’s AI research team will provide technical support in algorithm optimization and model training. CuspAI said that the platform will focus on discovering semiconductor materials with better performance, including dielectric materials, conductive channels and heat dissipation materials, to help chip manufacturers break through the physical limits of current process technology. CuspAI founder and CEO Chad Edwards said that the discovery of new materials is a key link in promoting the progress of the semiconductor industry, and AI technology is expected to increase the efficiency of material screening by several orders of magnitude. Nvidia did not disclose the specific scale of resource investment, but confirmed that it will give priority to providing CuspAI with the latest accelerated computing cluster support. CuspAI also announced the establishment of a new office in Singapore and plans to expand the team size from 120 people to more than 300 people within 18 months. The company stated that the "AI Materials Foundry" program has attracted the participation of 45 institutions, covering academic laboratories, national research institutions and industry enterprises, aiming to build an open materials science data ecosystem.