Facebooks parent company Meta on Monday said it has created what it believes is among the fastest artificial intelligence supercomputers running today.

The social media giant said it hopes the machine will help lay the groundwork for its building of the metaverse, a virtual reality construct intended to supplant the internet as we know it today.

Facebook said it believes the computer will be the fastest in the world once it is fully built around the middle of the year.

Supercomputers are extremely fast and powerful machines built to do complex calculations not possible with a regular home computer. Meta did not disclose where the computer is located or how much it is costing to build.

The computer, which is already up and running but is still being built, is called AI Research SuperCluster. Meta says it will help its AI researchers build new and better artificial intelligence models that can learn from trillions of examples and work across hundreds of different languages simultaneously and analyze text, images and video together.

We hope RSC will help us build entirely new AI systems that can, for example, power real-time voice translations to large groups of people, each speaking a different language, so they can seamlessly collaborate on a research project or play an AR game together, Meta said in a blog post.