Meta has picked Amazon Web Services (AWS) to be its strategic cloud partner as it looks to expand its artificial intelligence capabilities.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, said it will use AWS services to “complement” its on-premise infrastructure and also broaden its use of AWS compute, storage and security services.

Expanding on an existing partnership, Meta will now run third-party collaborations on AWS and use the cloud to support acquisitions of entities that are already powered by AWS. The use of AWS compute services will also be used to accelerate Meta’s AI research and development programmes.

Additionally, the partnership will also include work on PyTorch, which is an open source machine learning library developed by Facebook’s AI Research Lab. It’s based on the Torch library and used for applications such as computer vision and natural language processing. AWS will work on improving performance for building, training, deploying and operating PyTorch AI and ML learning models.

“We are excited to extend our strategic relationship with AWS to help us innovate faster and expand the scale and scope of our research and development work,” said Jason Kalich, vice president of production engineering at Meta. “The global reach and reliability of AWS will help us continue to deliver innovative experiences for the billions of people around the world that use Meta products and services and for customers running PyTorch on AWS.”

The two companies will collaborate on new native tools for PyTorch and simplify the deployment of models in production. This will include enhancements to TorchServe, which is the feeding engine for PyTorch. By working on these open-source contributions, AWS and Meta aim to help organisations bring large-scale deep learning models from research to production faster and easier with optimised performance on AWS.

“With this agreement, AWS will continue to help Meta support research and development, drive innovation, and collaborate with third parties and the open source community at scale,” Kathrin Renz, vice president of business development and industries at AWS. “Customers can rely on Meta and AWS to collaborate on PyTorch, making it easier for them to build, train, and deploy deep learning models on AWS.”