Edge AI chips Deloitte Insights

Many people may be familiar with the frustration of calling up their smartphone's speech-to-text function to dictate an email, only to find that it won't work because the phone isn't connected to the internet. Now, a new generation of edge artificial intelligence (AI) chips is set to reduce those frustrations by bringing the AI to the device.1 We predict that in 2020, more than 750 million edge AI chips--chips or parts of chips that perform or accelerate machine learning tasks on-device, rather than in a remote data center--will be sold. This number, representing a cool US$2.6 billion in revenue, is more than twice the 300 million edge AI chips Deloitte predicted would sell in 20172--a three-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 36 percent. Further, we predict that the edge AI chip market will continue to grow much more quickly than the overall chip market. By 2024, we expect sales of edge AI chips to exceed 1.5 billion, possibly by a great deal.3 This represents annual unit sales growth of at least 20 percent, more than double the longer-term forecast of 9 percent CAGR for the overall semiconductor industry.4 These edge AI chips will likely find their way into an increasing number of consumer devices, such as high-end smartphones, tablets, smart speakers, and wearables.