If there’s one thing that Apple got spot on, it’s the quasi obsessive approach to the stack.
Microsoft wants to launch an AI chip as it looks to establish itself as the Apple of AI, offering a vertically integrated solution for scale-out artificial intelligence. According to the Information (opens in new tab), Microsoft has been working on the chip, codenamed Athena, since 2019 and engineering samples are already available to some Microsoft and OpenAI employees. 2019 was the year when the former invested $1 billion in the latter; so there’s a likely link between the plan for the chip and this first investment.
Other US based companies (Amazon, Google, Facebook) and non-US entities (Tencent, Alibaba) have launched their own custom-built chips for AI with the aim to get a hardware solution that performs better than what is commercially available off the shelf. These processors are essential for inference and large-language model training and right now, Nvidia corners the market with the A100 and the H100.
