BofA reiterates Buy on Meta stock on custom AI chip plans

BofA Securities reiterated a Buy rating on Meta Platforms with an $810 price target after reports of the company's custom AI chip deployment plans, representing roughly 20% upside from the current stock price of $673.31. Meta plans to deploy its third-generation MTIA 450 chips, called Arke, in the first half of 2027, followed by the higher-performance MTIA 500, or Astrid, in late 2027. The chips, developed with Broadcom, are designed for AI inference and compute efficiency, with Meta expecting to deploy over 1 gigawatt of custom-chip capacity within 12 months. BofA estimates custom chips could generate approximately $8.5 billion in cost savings if Meta deploys 5-6 gigawatts of owned capacity in 2027, citing Alphabet's TPU success as precedent. The company canceled a combined training-inference chip project due to roughly 30% higher design costs.