The logo of NVIDIA as seen at its corporate headquarters in Santa Clara, California.
Credit: Reuters File Photo
Texas: On the south side of Austin, Texas, engineers at semiconductor maker Advanced Micro Devices designed an artificial intelligence chip called MI300 that was released a year ago and is expected to generate more than $5 billion in sales in its first year of release.
Not far away in a north Austin high-rise, designers at Amazon developed a new and faster version of an AI chip called Trainium.
Those two efforts in the capital of Texas reflect a shift in the rapidly evolving market of AI chips. The industry has long been dominated by Nvidia, which has leveraged its AI chips to become a $3 trillion behemoth.
Now the chips that Advanced Micro Devices, known as AMD, and Amazon have created are adding to signs that credible alternatives to Nvidia are finally emerging.
For some crucial AI tasks, Nvidia's rivals are proving they can deliver much faster speed, and at much lower prices, said Daniel Newman, an analyst at Futurum Group.
The shift is being driven by an array of tech companies that have started tailoring their chips for a particular phase of AI development that is becoming increasingly important. That process, called "inferencing," happens after companies use chips to train AI models.
Nvidia's rivals have also started taking a leaf out of the company's playbook in another way. They have begun emulating Nvidia's tactic of building complete computers so that customers can wring the maximum power and performance out of the chips for AI purposes.
The increased competition was evident Tuesday, when Amazon announced the availability of computing services based on its new Trainium 2 AI chips. The company also unveiled computers containing either 16 or 64 of the chips.
Spending on computers without Nvidia chips by data center operators, which provide the computing power needed for AI tasks, is expected to grow 49 per cent this year to $126 billion, according to Omdia, a market research firm.
Even so, the increased competition does not mean Nvidia is in danger of losing its lead. A spokesperson for the company pointed to comments made by Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive, who has said his company has major advantages in AI software and inferencing capability. Huang has added that demand is torrid for the company's new Blackwell AI chips, which he says perform many more calculations per watt of energy used, despite an increase in the power they need to operate.