MENLO PARK, California: Facebook's parent company, Meta, has announced the creation of what it believes is among the fastest artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputers in the world.

The social media company said it hopes the computer, known as AI Research SuperCluster, will help establish the groundwork for the metaverse, its virtual reality construct intended to replace the internet.

But it has not disclosed the computer's location or cost.

The computer, which, according to Facebook, will be the fastest in the world, is already operating, though is still being built.

Meta says the computer will help its AI researchers build "new and better" AI models that can learn from "trillions" of examples and work across hundreds of different languages simultaneously and analyze text, images and videos.

Tuomas Sandholm, a computer science professor and co-director of the AI center at Carnegie Mellon University, said, "The way Meta is defining the power of its computer is different from how conventional and more technically powerful supercomputers are measured, because it relies on the performance of graphics-processing chips, which are useful for running 'deep learning' algorithms that can understand what is in an image, analyze text and translate between languages," as quoted by the Associated Press.

In a blog post, Meta wrote, "We hope RSC will help us build entirely new AI systems that can, for example, power real-time voice translations to large groups of people, each speaking a different language, so they can seamlessly collaborate on a research project or play an AR game together."

According to the company, the computer will incorporate "real-world examples" from its own systems into training its AI, adding that its previous efforts used only open-source and other publicly available data sets.

"They are going to, for the first time, put their customer data on their AI research computer. That would be a really big change to give AI researchers and algorithms access to all that data," Sandholm said.