Facebook’s parent company Meta says that its newly-created artificial intelligence (AI) “Research SuperCluster” (RSC) will “pave the way” towards building the Metaverse.

The social media giant said that it believes RSC is already one of the fastest supercomputers in the world and will snag the top spot when it’s fully operational in mid-2022, according to a Jan, 24 blog post unveiling the hardware.

“Developing the next generation of advanced AI will require powerful new computers capable of quintillions of operations per second,” wrote the company.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg added in a Jan. 25 Facebook post:

The machine will be able to work across hundreds of different languages to develop “advanced AI” for computer vision, natural language processing, and speech recognition.

Meta didn’t disclose where the computer is located, or the costs associated with its development and creation.

Decentralized finance analyst Camilla Russo compared Meta’s new machine to the Ethereum network, which is considered by some in the industry to be a global “supercomputer” of sorts already.

facebook @Meta builds a supercomputer in private to better monetize users' data in its metaverse.ethereum builds a world computer in the open that allows users to control their data in the metaverse.not the same. https://t.co/lTFIFRw840

Related: Nvidia CEO: We’re ‘on the cusp of’ a blockchain and NFT-enabled metaverse

In Dec. 2021, Vice President of Intel’s accelerated computing systems and graphics group, Raja Koduri, said that current computational infrastructure will need to improve a thousand-fold in order to power the Metaverse.

“You need to access to petaflops [one thousand teraflops] of computing in less than a millisecond, less than ten milliseconds for