Battle to Provide Chips for the AI Boom Heats Up

Jensen Huang beamed out over a packed conference hall in San Jose, California, on Wednesday as he announced his company's new chip aimed at accelerating artificial intelligence algorithms. But metaphorically speaking, the CEO of chip maker Nvidia was looking over his shoulder. Nvidia's profits and stock have surged over the past few years because the graphics processors it invented to power gaming and graphics production have enabled many recent breakthroughs in machine learning (see "10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013: Deep Learning"). But as investment in artificial intelligence soars, Huang's company now faces competition from Intel, Google, and others working on their own AI chips. At Nvidia's annual developer conference on Wednesday, Huang carefully avoided mentioning any competitors by name as he introduced Nvidia's latest chip, named the Tesla V100.