Amazon, Advanced Micro Devices and several start-ups are beginning to offer credible alternatives to Nvidia’s A.I. microchips, delivering much faster speed and much lower prices.

AMD(Advanced Micro Devices) designed an artificial intelligence chip called MI300(2013 release) and Amazon developed a new and faster version of an A.I. chip called Tranium.

Those two efforts in the capital of Texas reflect a shift in the rapidly evolving market of A.I. chips, which are perhaps the hottest and most coveted technology of the moment.

Now the chips that AMD and Amazon have created as well as customer reactions to their technology suggest that credible alternatives to Nvidia are finally emerging.

The shift is being driven by an array of tech companies – large competitors such as Amazon and AMD, as well as smaller start-ups – that have started tailoring their chips for a particular phase of A.I. development that is becoming increasingly important.

Nvidia’s rivals have also started taking a leaf out of the company’s playbook in another way. Thy have begun emulating Nvidia’s tactic of building complete computers – not only the chips – so that customers can wring the maximum power and performance out of the chips for A.I. purposes.

Amazon is even building a kind of giant A.I. factory for the start-up Anthropic, which it has invested in. That computing “cluster” will have hundreds of thousands of the new Trainium chips and will be five times as powerful as any that Anthropic has used before.

Spending on computers without Nvidia chips by data center operators, which provide the power needed for A.I. tasks, is expected to grow 49 percent this year to $126 billion, according to Omdia, a market research firm.

The changing A.I. chip market has been propelled partly by well-funded start-ups such as SambaNova Systems, Groq and Cerebras Systems, which have developed big speed advantages in inferencing, with lower prices and power consumption.

Nvidia’s current chips can cost as much as $15,000 each, and its Blackwell chips are expected to cost tens of thousands of dollars each. That has pushed some customers toward alternatives.

AMD said it expected to target Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, with its own new A.I. chips arriving next year.

Meta has trained a new A.I. model, called Llama 3.1 405B, using Nvidia chips but that it uses AMD MI300s chips for providing answers to users.

Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta are also designing their own A.I. chips to speed up specific computing chores and achieve lower costs, while still building big clusters of machines powered by Nvidia’s chips.

This month, Google plans to begin selling services based on a sixth generation of internally developed chips, called Trillium, which is nearly five times as fast as its predecessor.

Amazon, sometimes regarded as a laggard in A.I., seems particularly determined to catch up. The company allocated $75billion this year for A.I. chips and other computing hardware, among other capital spending.

Amazon is far more optimistic about the new Trainium 2 chips, which are four times as fast as previous chips. The company also announced plans for another chip, Trainium 4, which was set to be even more powerful.

”The reality is, in my business, I don’t care what silicon is underneath. What I care about is that I get the best price-performance and that I can get it to the end users”

New York Times – 2024.12.5