“Nvidia’s dominance forces competitors to join forces” – Kommersant FM

Kommersant FM columnist Alexander Levi talks about how large technology companies are opposing Nvidia’s hegemony in the field of artificial intelligence.

Nvidia’s dominance in the artificial intelligence market is forcing rivals to join forces. Major IT companies such as Intel, Google, Arm, Qualcomm, Samsung and others have formed a group to create an open source software package. According to the creators, their product should untie AI creators from proprietary Nvidia solutions, and also allow the new code to work on any machine and with any chip, Reuters reports.

The alliance, called The Unified Acceleration Foundation (UXL), expects the technical details of the project to reach a mature state by the second half of 2024. However, the final release date has not yet been announced. Right now we can talk about the open standard OneAPI developed by Intel, which should eliminate requirements such as specific coding languages, databases and other special tools that tie developers to the use of a specific architecture such as the CUDA platform authored by Nvidia.

The latter, by the way, as a chip manufacturer in March became the first company whose market capitalization reached $2 trillion. This is largely due to the vendor’s focus on hardware for running artificial intelligence models. In particular, we are talking about the H100 and H200 GPUs. These models are superior to the current analogues of other chipmakers, and therefore cause demand at the level of hype, which leads to a shortage of the product, starting the cycle all over again.

According to statements from the association of Intel, Google, Arm and others, the project is currently aimed at opening up opportunities for AI applications and high-performance computing for members of the organization. But eventually the group plans to support Nvidia hardware and code as well. The Unified Acceleration Foundation is now asking for help from other chipmakers and cloud computing companies such as Amazon and Microsoft. The Redmont team is not part of the coalition. According to rumors, back in 2023, Microsoft teamed up with AMD to develop alternative chips for artificial intelligence. And these giants are among the few that could challenge Nvidia’s virtual monopoly in AI.