The AI chip startup boom

The raw computational power necessary to use machine learning has dwarfed everything else we use computer chips to accomplish by an order of magnitude. And that appetite for power has created a booming market for chip startups for the first time in years and helped double venture capital investments over the past five years. AI market leader Nvidia estimates that most machine-learning or AI tasks have spurred a 25-fold increase in the need for processing power every two years, while one of the most advanced natural-language-processing models needs 275 times the compute power every two years to work. The boom has also created opportunities for a new breed of chip company, one that is focused on making specialized chips for AI. Prior to 2015 only a small handful of venture capitalists saw the opportunity that AI presented, and there was little overall interest in funding chip companies.