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A close-up of the Trainium 2 chip.

The Furious Contest to Unseat Nvidia as King of A.I. Chips

Amazon, Advanced Micro Devices and several start-ups are beginning to offer credible alternatives to Nvidia’s chips, especially for a phase of A.I. development known as “inferencing.”

Amazon’s new Trainium 2 chips are set to ramp up competition with Nvidia, the dominant maker of artificial intelligence chips. Credit...Spencer Lowell for The New York Times

The Furious Contest to Unseat Nvidia as King of A.I. Chips

Amazon, Advanced Micro Devices and several start-ups are beginning to offer credible alternatives to Nvidia’s chips, especially for a phase of A.I. development known as “inferencing.”

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Reporting from Austin, Texas

On the south side of Austin, Texas, engineers at the semiconductor maker Advanced Micro Devices designed an artificial intelligence chip called MI300 that was released a year ago and is expected to generate more than $5 billion in sales in its first year of release.

Not far away in a north Austin high-rise, designers at Amazon developed a new and faster version of an A.I. chip called Trainium. They then tested the chip in creations including palm-size circuit boards and complex computers the size of two refrigerators.

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. The industry has long been dominated by Nvidia, which has leveraged its A.I. chips to become a $3 trillion behemoth. For years, others tried to match the company’s chips, which provide enormous computing power for A.I. tasks, but made little progress.

Now the chips that Advanced Micro Devices, known as AMD, and Amazon have created — as well as customer reactions to their technology — are adding to signs that credible alternatives to Nvidia are finally emerging.

ImageA person wearing large, ear-covering headphones stands in front of a server with cords running across it.
A Trainium 2 system at an Amazon facility in Austin, Texas. Credit...Spencer Lowell for The New York Times
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Advanced Micro Devices tests its MI300 artificial intelligence chips in computers.Credit...Spencer Lowell for The New York Times

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