Chip race: Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Nvidia battle it out for AI chip supremacy

The rise of generative AI was powered by Nvidia and its H100 GPU. As demand far outstripped supply, the H100 became highly sought after and extremely expensive, prompting customers including Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, Amazon, and Google to start working on their own AI processors. Meanwhile, Nvidia and other chip makers like AMD and Intel are now locked in an arms race to release newer, more efficient, more powerful AI chips.

As demand for generative AI services continues to grow, it’s more evident that chips will be the next big battleground for AI supremacy.

  • Meta’s reportedly working on a new AI chip it plans to launch this year.

    Reuters reports “Artemis” will complement the hundreds of thousands of Nvidia H100 chips Meta bought. Similar to the MTIA chip Meta announced last year, Artemis is also focused on inference — the actual decision-making part of AI — and not training AI models, but it’s already a little late to the game.

    Google introduced a second-generation TPU in 2017 that could do both, and so can Microsoft’s recently-announced Maia 100. And AMD claims its M1300X chip performs better than H100s on the inference side.

  • AMD says its MI300 AI accelerator is “now tracking to be the fastest revenue ramp of any product in our history”.

    While that doesn’t quite tell us how well AMD’s competing with Nvidia in the AI gold rush, AMD CEO Lisa Su says she’s not sitting back: “The demand for compute is so high that we are seeing an acceleration of the roadmap generations here.”

    She confirmed Zen 5 CPUs are still on track for this year, with server chips in second half. Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo, MSI, and “other large PC OEMs” will begin putting Ryzen 8000 notebooks on sale in February.

  • Nvidia’s AI partners are also its competition.

    Nvidia powers most of the AI projects from Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, and Meta, but they’re also trying to lessen their dependence on its limited supply. The New York Times explains they want to make switching between Nvidia chips and others (including their own) “as simple” as possible.

    As The Verge reported, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is interested in building chips. Microsoft’s AI-focused chip Maia 100 is expected to arrive this year, and Amazon announced the latest version of its Trainium chip.

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