Industry analysts agree that Intel’s competitive plan is solid, but it has a steep hill to climb to catch Nvidia, a fabless chipmaker that boasts about 90% of the data center AI GPU market and 80% of the entire AI chip market.
Over time, more than half of Nvidia’s data center business will come from AI services run in the cloud, according to Raj Joshi, senior vice president for Moody’s Investors Service. “The lesson has not been lost on cloud providers such as Google and Amazon, each of which have their own GPUs to support AI-centric workloads,” he said.
“Essentially, there’s only one player that’s providing Nvidia and AMD GPUs, and that’s TSMC in Taiwan, which is the leading developer of semiconductors today, both in terms of its technology and its market share,” Joshi said.
Intel is not fabless. It has long dominated the design and manufacture of high-performance CPUs, though recent challenges due to genAI reflect fundamental changes in the computing landscape.
Ironically, Intel’s Gaudi 3 chip is manufactured by TSMC using its 5 nanometer (nm) process technology versus the previous 7nm process.
GenAI in data centers today, edge tomorrow
Data centers will continue to deploy CPUs in large numbers to support Internet services and cloud computing, but they are increasingly deploying GPUs to support AI — and Intel has struggled to design competitive GPUs, according to Benjamin Lee, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science.
