Facebook hires chip development head

Facebook Inc. has sent another signal that it’s serious about building its own semiconductors, joining Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google, and Amazon.com Inc. in trying to make its own custom chips.

The social-networking giant this month hired Shahriar Rabii to be a vice president and head of silicon. Rabii previously worked at Google, where he helped lead the team in charge of building chips for the company’s devices, including the Pixel smartphone’s custom Visual Core chip, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Facebook started forming a team to design chips earlier this year, Bloomberg News reported in April. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company is working on semiconductors, which can be useful for a variety of different efforts, including to process information for its vast data centers and its artificial intelligence work.