Google announced a proprietary chip Tuesday that could help it reduce its dependence on major chipmakers and gain a foothold in the increasingly competitive artificial intelligence race.
The new chip, called Axion, will help manage the huge amount of data used by artificial intelligence applications, the company said in a statement on Tuesday. It is designed to be grouped into clusters of thousands of chips to improve performance Wall Street Journal reported.
The new chips – which are central processing units, or CPUs – are reportedly 30% better than already available “general purpose” chips using similar circuitry made by UK-based semiconductor and software company Arm, he said. the company said in a statement. Although Google has previously made other chips for its different business segments, this is the first intended to support artificial intelligence in data centers.
Customers of the Alphabet subsidiary will be able to access Axion through Google’s business cloud later this year, but will not be able to purchase it directly, the report said. magazine. The vice president of the company that oversees the proprietary chips, Amin Vahdat, told the newspaper that he wants to take a different approach.
“Becoming a large hardware company is very different from becoming a large cloud company or a large global information organizer,” Vahdat said.
By not selling directly to customers, Google is avoiding direct competition with its longtime partners and dominant chipmakers, Intel and Nvidia. Instead, Vahdat said the company sees its entry into the chip market as a positive for everyone in the industry.
“I see it as a basis for increasing the size of the pie,” Vahdat said.
As the hypercompetitive race to enable AI heats up, Google’s rivals likely don’t share this vision. On Tuesday, Santa Clara, California-based semiconductor company Intel released the AI-focused Gaudi 3 chip. Intel says the new chips will be available by the third quarter and can be used to train large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. The company claims that the Gaudi 3 chips have an advantage over Nvidia’s competing chip, the H100.
Nvidia, meanwhile, announced the next generation of its popular H100 chip in November and plans to release it later this year. However, Nvidia shares closed 2% lower on Tuesday following the news. The company has seen its shares skyrocket about 75% since the start of the year due to disproportionate demand for its powerful H100 chips, but it faces growing competition.
Shares of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, jumped as much as 2.4% the day after news of the new chip, before paring gains. The stock closed up 1.28% at around $158.