New Artificial Intelligence Chips Lean Toward the Edge

Few companies had enjoyed the sort of bull run AI chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA) had been on, returning more than 1200% between June 2015 and June 2018, eventually hitting a market cap of about $175 billion by September 2018. Then everything went south – literally – as the market took a historic plunge in the fourth quarter, taking Nvidia with it. However, while many companies have bounced back, Nvidia has continued to languish, sitting at a valuation of about $88 billion, pretty much where it was circa May 2017 when we compared its AI chip technology against AMD (AMD). Now, over the last five years, the two chip manufacturers have returned almost identical value to investors, while a number of upstart startups have risen to also challenge Nvidia's supremacy with new artificial intelligence chips. In fact, it was exactly three years ago that we first introduced you to five startups building artificial intelligence chips, and then followed that up with 12 new AI chip makers in 2017.