Amazon, Advanced Micro Devices and several start-ups are beginning to offer credible alternatives to Nvidia’s chips, especially for a phase of A.I. development known as “inferencing.”
On the south side of Austin, Texas, engineers at the semiconductor maker Advanced Micro Devices designed an artificial intelligence chip called MI300 that was released a year ago and is expected to generate more than $5 billion in sales in its first year of release.
Not far away in a north Austin high-rise, designers at Amazon developed a new and faster version of an A.I. chip called Trainium. They then tested the chip in creations including palm-size circuit boards and complex computers the size of two refrigerators.