Will Artificial Intelligence Spark a Chip Cambrian Explosion? - insideBIGDATA

The computer chip industry over the last couple of decades has seen its innovation stem from just a few top players like Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm. In this same time span, the VC industry has shown waning interest in start-up companies that made computer chips. The risk was just too great; how could a start-up compete with a behemoth like Intel which made the CPUs that operated more than 80% of the world's PCs? In areas that that Intel wasn't the dominate force, companies like Qualcomm and NVIDIA were a force for the smartphone and gaming markets. The recent resurgence of the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has upended this status quo. It turns out that AI benefits from specific types of processors that perform operations in parallel, and this fact opens up tremendous opportunities for newcomers.