Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger: Customers Want An Alternative To NVIDIA for AI Chips

It’s about to get hot in NVIDIA’s kitchen.

All year, competitors watched as the chipmaker added hundreds of billions in market cap and became AI operators’ go-to technology. They saw startups scrambling to rent time on its H100 chips, VCs buying thousands of them, and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang go from relative unknown to tech icon in a blink. Here comes their response.

After ceding much of the early generative AI boom to NVIDIA, the competition is releasing —?and proving the value of — chips that can run large language models in a similar fashion. Tech giants like Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft are designing their own AI chips and training models on them. And Rival chipmakers like AMD and Intel are producing AI-optimized chips themselves. And amid a supply crunch, startups are willing to try alternatives.

“It's the law of competition,” David Trainer, CEO of research firm New Constructs, told me. “People are going after this space because there's an enormous amount of money to be made in it.”

First among NVIDIA’s challengers are fellow trillion-dollar companies Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. It went largely unnoticed last week, but Google’s announcement of its Gemini AI model left NVIDIA out entirely. Google trained Gemini on its own chips, called Tensor Processor Units, or TPUs, not NVIDIA’s H100s, leaving industry insiders buzzing.?

Then comes Intel, where CEO Pat Gelsinger told me that “customers are looking for alternatives" to NVIDIA.

“All of a sudden," Gelsinger said on Big Technology Podcast this week, they're saying "I want an alternative, and NVIDIA’s short on supply. And I'm getting a much better total cost of ownership from Intel. Hey, let's go start testing this.”

Listen to my full conversation with Gelsinger on Big Technology Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your podcast app of choice.

Thanks and have a nice weekend!