In September, Amazon said it would invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, a San Francisco start-up working on artificial intelligence.
Soon after, an Amazon executive sent a private message to an executive at another company. He said Anthropic had won the deal because it agreed to build its A.I. using specialized computer chips designed by Amazon.
Amazon, he wrote, wanted to create a viable competitor to the chipmaker Nvidia, a key partner and kingmaker in the all-important field of artificial intelligence.
The boom in generative A.I. over the last year exposed just how dependent big tech companies had become on Nvidia. They cannot build chatbots and other A.I. systems without a special kind of chip that Nvidia has mastered over the past several years. They have spent billions of dollars on Nvidia’s systems, and the chipmaker has not kept up with the demand.
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