Marc Andreessen famously wrote that âSoftware will eat the world.â But hardware is the master chef, preparing the ingredients for success, meaning that chips with AI chops are going to be coveted, even hoarded.
For decades weâve associated Intel with cutting-edge chips, but todayâs crown goes to Nvidia for specialized processors that can speed up AI. Nvidia
doesnât actually manufacture chips; they design them for manufacture elsewhere. Last week the company hit close to a trillion-dollar
valuation. Chips that can handle the processing requirements of new generative AI systems are in short supply, and almost all of them are designed by Nvidia.
âItâs Iike toilet paper during the pandemic,â said Sharon Zhou, co-founder and CEO of Lamini, an AI company, in a Wall Street Journal article about chip hoarding. For the moment most of the chips are being gobbled up by big cloud-processing companies, but trust us,
weâre about to see a new generation of GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) and CPU (Central Processing Unit) machines for personal use as well. |