Meta Platforms' AI chip and cloud plans spark 15% stock surge

Meta Platforms' shares rose about 15% last week, their strongest weekly gain since early 2024, after the company detailed new artificial‑intelligence initiatives. The firm announced it will launch a custom AI chip, codenamed Iris, in September and is partnering with Broadcom and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing to reduce reliance on external chipmakers. Meta also introduced Muse Spark 1.1, an AI model for coding and agentic tasks, and set developer pricing at $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens, undercutting rivals such as Anthropic. The company said it may eventually rent AI compute capacity to outside customers, positioning itself against Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. A new data centre in Alberta, Canada, was disclosed to support the growing AI workload. Investor confidence was bolstered by a Bank of America buy rating and by institutional investors, including Whittier Trust, increasing their holdings. The combined AI hardware, software and cloud‑service signals aim to lower infrastructure costs and open new revenue streams beyond advertising.