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Artificial Intelligence

The AI Chip Wars Aren't Slowing Down

September 10, 2023
x min read
The AI Chip Wars Aren't Slowing Down

The battle to find the next transformative AI chipmaker has begun. And tech giants and venture capitalists all want in.

What’s happening:

  • With demand for generative AI hardware and compute still on the uptick, new startups are forming to try to capture some of the opportunity
  • Because venture capital continues to pile into AI startups pursuing everything from consumer apps to drug discovery the wait times for GPUs are at an all time high
  • As a result, hardware startups and AI chipmakers are raising capital at a rapid pace to try to fill the void

Who is making moves:

  • d-Matrix recently raised $110M from Microsoft and other investors after unveiling their compute card they claim has nine times the throughput of Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) GPUs for generative AI
  • Further, d-Matrix claims their hardware could consume twenty times less energy for AI compute in comparison to other popular GPUs
  • California based startup Cerebras Systems recently built its first ‘AI supercomputer’ which cost over $100M to build and aims to provide an a new alternative for AI generative workloads
  • Notably, Cerbras Systems has a partnership with Abu Dhabi based G42 and has plans to bring their supercomputers to the UAE
  • BrainChip Holdings (ASX: BRN) recently was awarded a first of its kind patent around their neuromorphic AI intellectual property, which enables their chip to process information in a similar way to the human brain
  • BrainChip's flagship AI processor Akida is currently being used by NASA and Mercedes Benz

Why it matters:

  • Everyone from Silicon Valley to Wall Street is wondering what the next big breakthrough in AI hardware will be, from GPUs to NPUs to new supercomputers
  • With the backlog of Nvidia GPUs expected to continue for the foreseeable future there is a golden window for other hardware producers and chip makers to potentially thrive
  • Currently, AI workloads require enormous amounts of computational power and energy. Reducing the amount of electricity and power required for generative AI workloads is an enormous opportunity
  • The giants of tech and venture capital are positioning themselves to own some of the underlying infrastructure of AI compute so these mega funding rounds might just be getting started


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