Meta Platforms Inc. has hired an Oslo-based team that until late last year was building artificial-intelligence networking technology at British chip unicorn Graphcore.
A Meta spokesperson confirmed the hirings in response to a request for comment, after Reuters identified 10 people whose LinkedIn profiles said they worked at Graphcore until December 2022 or January 2023 and subsequently joined Meta in February or March of this year.
"We recently welcomed a number of highly-specialized engineers in Oslo to our infrastructure team at Meta. They bring deep expertise in the design and development of supercomputing systems to support AI and machine learning at scale in Meta's data centers," said Jon Carvill, the Meta spokesperson.
The move brings additional muscle to the social media giant's bid to improve how its data centers handle AI work, as it races to cope with demand for AI-oriented infrastructure from teams across the company looking to build new features.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has become increasingly reliant on AI technology to target advertising, select posts for its apps' feeds and purge banned content from its platforms.
On top of that, it is now rushing to join competitors like Microsoft Corp and Alphabet Inc's Google in releasing generative AI products capable of creating human-like writing, art and other content, which investors see as the next big growth area for tech companies.
The 10 employees' job descriptions on LinkedIn indicated the team had worked on AI-specific networking technology at Graphcore, which develops computer chips and systems optimized for AI work.
Carvill declined to say what they would be working on at Meta.
Graphcore closed its Oslo office as part of a broader restructuring announced in October last year, a spokesperson for the startup said, as it struggled to make inroads against U.S.-based firms like Nvidia Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc which dominate the market for AI chips.