As the summer of 2022 came to a close, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gathered his top lieutenants for a five-hour dissection of the company's computing capacity, focused on its ability to do cutting-edge artificial intelligence work, according to a company memo dated Sept. 20 reviewed by Reuters.

They had a thorny problem: despite high-profile investments in AI research, the social media giant had been slow to adopt expensive AI-friendly hardware and software systems for its main business, hobbling its ability to keep pace with innovation at scale even as it increasingly relied on AI to support its growth, according to the memo, company statements and interviews with 12 people familiar with the changes, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal company matters.

"We have a significant gap in our tooling, workflows and processes when it comes to developing for AI. We need to invest heavily here," said the memo, written by new head of infrastructure Santosh Janardhan, which was posted on Meta's internal message board in September and is being reported now for the first time.

Supporting AI work would require Meta (META.O) to "fundamentally shift our physical infrastructure design, our software systems, and our approach to providing a stable platform," it added.

For more than a year, Meta has been engaged in a massive project to whip its AI infrastructure into shape. While the company has publicly acknowledged "playing a little bit of catch-up" on AI hardware trends, details of the overhaul - including capacity crunches, leadership changes and a scrapped AI chip project - have not been reported previously.