Investing.com -- Meta on Wednesday announced four custom, in-house chips designed for artificial intelligence tasks as part of the company's data center expansion plans.

The specialized silicon is part of the Meta Training and Inference Accelerator, or MTIA, family of chips, which the company first revealed publicly in 2023 before releasing a second-generation version in 2024.

Meta said it is developing and deploying four new generations of MTIA chips within the next two years to support ranking and recommendations, along with generative AI workloads. The company stated this represents a much faster pace than typical chip cycles.

Meta Vice President of Engineering Yee Jiun Song told CNBC that by designing custom chips, which are then manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor, the social media company can squeeze more price per performance across its data center fleet rather than relying only on vendors.

"This also provides us with, with more diversity in terms of silicon supply, and insulates us from price changes to some extent," Song said. "This is a little bit more leverage."

The first new chip, MTIA 300, was deployed a few weeks ago and is intended to help train smaller AI models that underpin Meta's core ranking and recommendation tasks, Song said. These tasks include showing people relevant content and online ads within the company's family of apps like Facebook and Instagram.

The upcoming chips are intended for more cutting-edge generative AI-related inference tasks like creating images and videos based on people's written prompts. The chips will not be used for training giant large language models, Song said.

Meta said in a blog post that it had finished testing the MTIA 400 and is "on the path to deploying it in our data centers," while the other two chips will be operational in 2027.

"It's unusual for any silicon company or team to be releasing a new chip every six months. It's a very quick cadence," Song said. "And the big reason for this is that we find ourselves building out capacity so quickly at the moment, and spending so much on CapEX, that at any given time we want to have the state-of-the-art chip to deploy."

Song said the company expects the chips to have a "standard five-plus years of useful lifetime."

Meta's AI spending includes a data center in Louisiana and two others in Ohio and Indiana. Meta is also reportedly looking to lease space at the Stargate site in Texas after OpenAI and Oracle scrapped plans to expand the AI data center site, according to Bloomberg.