AI chip crunch: startups vie for Nvidia's vital component
The artificial intelligence revolution is fully underway, but soaring demand for its most crucial component has startups scratching their heads on how they can deliver on AI's promise.
Generative AI's lifeblood is a book-sized semiconductor known as the graphics processing unit (GPU) -- built by one company, Nvidia.
Nvidia's CEO and founder Jensen Huang made a wild bet years ago that the world would soon clamor for a powerful chip usually used for making video games, but that could build AI as well.
No company working with the generative AI models that fuel today's frenzy can get off the ground without Nvidia's singular product: the latest model is the H100 and its accompanying software.
That painful reality is one that Amazon, Intel, AMD and others are scrambling to fix with their own alternatives, but those attempts could take years.
- 'Not a lot of GPUs' -
And with the biggest tech companies throwing all their financial might into generative AI, the smaller fish must go on the hunt to secure Nvidia's holy grail.
"Around the world, it is becoming very hard to get thousands of GPUs because all these big companies are putting in billions of dollars, stockpiling GPUs," said Fangbo Tao, co-founder of Mindverse.AI, a Singapore-based startup.
"There's not a lot of GPUs around," he said.
Tao spoke to AFP at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, where AI startups jostled to make their pitches to Silicon Valley's venture capitalists (VC).
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