The CEO of NVIDIA seems apparently threatened by the massive adoption of ASIC by technological companies, because they would be a counter-stressing to the infrastructure of the Green Team.
The CEO of Nvidia says that the ASICs will not be able to execute the deployment of the scale, but the competition remains fierce
Although Team Green has a sort of monopoly on the AI training markets, history shows us that such situations do not last very long, and it seems that Nvidia’s “Kryptonite” would probably be the integration of ASIC by its partners. In a post by DigitimateIt is said that the CEO of Team Green was invited to know if the ASIC (integrated circuits specific to the application) would threaten the domination of the company in the AI markets, and in response, Jensen made a fairly uncertain remark, saying that they are “not competitive”.
Well, if you are not aware of what Asics are, these are essentially chips designed for a specific workload, or in the case of AI, contact a functionality such as IA inference. They have enormous advantages that we will discuss in advance, but before that, it is reported that companies like Google, Microsoft, Broadcom, Openai and many others participate in developing their personalized chips, not only to challenge the domination of Nvidia, but to find an alternative to the monopoly on the markets created by Team Green equipment.
Jensen said that even if traditional CSPs manage to create personalized ASICs, they will not have the ability to deploy them on a large scale, since it requires not only good expertise, but apparently, many of them have tried and failed to do so. However, this time, with AI becoming a dominant current, the industry explores options in addition to obtaining Nvidia equipment, since not only is the supply chain exhausted because of its appearance on a single source, but the ASIC has several advantages.
Given companies like Microsoft and Google develop their personalized AI chips, this would allow them to manage a more financially viable approach, because ASICs are adapted to a particular workload, offering much more effective performance than Nvidia clusters. In addition, companies will have the opportunity to have their own supply, which means that they will not be influenced by market demand and experience delays, ultimately putting them before the curve.
Although the ASICs look like the right approach, they actually come with high R&D costs, and because of this, many CSPs prefer the solutions of the Plug-And-Play of Team Green. But, Nvidia’s domination is always questioned by the emergence of ASIC solutions, and with companies like Broadcom leading the race, Nvidia should certainly consider the competition they will see to come.