In the race to build the best AI, there's already one clear winner

As Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Baidu take turns leapfrogging each other in artificial intelligence innovation, one company stands to profit from any outcome: Nvidia. Graphics processor units, the company's biggest moneymaker, have become the industry standard for deep learning, a flavor of artificial intelligence widely used by tech companies to build personal virtual assistants, image recognition for tagging photos, and even the software behind self-driving cars. Despite talks from Microsoft and Google about developing their own proprietary chips, almost every major tech company is partnered up with Nvidia and uses its hardware. Last month, Microsoft announced a partnership to work with Nvidia's AI-tailored DGX-1 supercomputer, and Google's recently revamped cloud services will offer the option to run on Nvidia GPUs in 2017. Facebook's open-source Big Sur design for their server racks also rely on Nvidia hardware.