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 $US5 billion in sales in its first year of release.
Now the chips that Advanced Micro Devices, known as AMD, and Amazon have created — as well as customer reactions to their technology — are adding to signs that credible alternatives to Nvidia are finally emerging. 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 — and not just the chips — 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 and testimonials from potential users including Apple.
In total, spending on computers without Nvidia chips by data centre operators, which provide the computing power needed for AI tasks, is expected to grow 49 per cent this year to $US126 billion, according to Omdia, a market research firm. That has pushed some customers toward alternatives. Dan Stanzione, executive director of the Texas Advanced Computing Centre, a research centre, said the organisation planned to buy a Blackwell-based supercomputer next year but would most likely also use chips from SambaNova for inferencing tasks because of their lower power consumption and pricing.AMD said it expected to target Nvidia’s Blackwell chips with its own new AI chips arriving next year.