Major Tech Companies Are Joining Forces To Topple NVIDIA’s AI Dominance
Major Tech Companies Are Joining Forces To Topple NVIDIA’s AI Dominance
NVIDIA is indisputably the most successful company to come out of the AI wave – at 2.31 trillion USD, the company is now the third most valuable in the world. Much of that success is attributed to the supply of its H100 Tensor GPUs, which are currently gobbled by practically every company entering the AI field, including the likes of Google, OpenAI, Tesla, and many others.
With Team Green achieving a near-monopoly on something as massive as AI, it has certainly got a few companies rather nervous. In fact, ex-AMD Scott Herkelmann has even called NVIDIA a ‘GPU cartel’ with its grip on the market giving it the capability to engage in retaliatory shipment delays.
Reuters reported that a group formed by various major tech companies, which includes names like Intel, Google, Arm, Qualcomm, Samsung, and others are developing an alternative to NVIDIA’s CUDA platform – the company’s proprietary standard for GPU compute programming, and one of the major contributors to Team Green’s AI dominance today. The Unified Acceleration Foundation (UXL) as it is called, is utilizing open standards like Intel’s oneAPI to reduce reliance on NVIDIA’s hardware and software stack.
The group has already laid out timelines and targets, including establishing the technical specifications by the first half of 2024, and a refinement to a “mature” state is expected by the end of 2024. Microsoft and Amazon are both major users of datacenter chips, and UXL hopes to court them with its offerings.
If successful, open-source solutions like Intel oneAPI may reach the “critical mass of developers,” allowing it to compete against CUDA head-to-head. However, as The Verge notes, it is rumored that Microsoft already has its own plans that involve AMD – with the same goal of developing alternative AI chips to challenge NVIDIA’s AI monopoly.
Pokdepinion: I strongly believe that NVIDIA’s market domination today will be temporary – no major company wants to put all its AI eggs in one green-colored basket.
