SAN FRANCISCO, March 11 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms ( META )

on Wednesday unveiled a roadmap of four new chips that

the company is making in-house, as it rapidly expands its data

centers.

Like many big tech companies such as Alphabet and Microsoft ( MSFT ),

Meta has invested heavily in building a team that can design

chips in-house in addition to purchasing off-the-shelf products

made by Nvidia ( NVDA ) and Advanced Micro Devices ( AMD ).

Making chips designed to tackle the specific types of data

crunching Meta requires can lead to designs that use less energy

and at a better cost.

The new chips are part of the company's Meta Training and

Inference Accelerator (MTIA) program and the first of the new

chips called the MTIA 300 is in use powering the company's

ranking and recommendation systems. The other three will be

rolled out this year and in 2027, with the final two chips, the

MTIA 450 and 500 being designed to perform inference, the

process when an AI model such as the one that powers the ChatGPT

app responds to customer queries and requests.

"We see inference demand exploding at the moment and that's

what we're currently focused on," Yee Jiun Song, Meta's vice

president of engineering, said in an interview.

Meta has had some success with inference chips but has

struggled with its long-time ambitions to make a generative AI

training chip, capable of building the large models that power

AI apps.

Beginning with the MTIA 400, which the company says is on

the path to being used in its data centers, Meta has designed an

entire system around the chips, which is roughly the size of

several server racks and includes a version of liquid cooling.

The company plans to release the new chips at six-month

intervals because it is rapidly expanding the number of data

centers it uses to run apps like Instagram and Facebook, Song

said.

"That is the reality of how quickly our infrastructure is

being built out," Song said.

The company said in January it expects capital spending of

between $115 billion and $135 billion this year.

Meta contracts Broadcom ( AVGO ) to help with some elements

of the designs, though Song did not specify which chips. The

company uses Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co ( TSM ) to

fabricate the processors.

In February, Meta signed big deals with Nvidia ( NVDA ) and AMD to

buy tens of billions of dollars worth of chips.