AMD shares rose nearly 5% on Thursday, a day after Microsoft’s chief technology officer said the chipmaker was strengthening its position in the artificial intelligence hardware market, which is now widely dominated by NVIDIA. This was reported by CNBC.
Riding the AI boom, NVIDIA shares have nearly tripled this year, while AMD shares are up about 60%. Since OpenAI launched its ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022, the tech industry has shown significant interest in using the large language models that power modern AI algorithms. However, on an industry scale, they require enormous computing power to operate.
The bulk of this computing power is provided by NVIDIA. With continued incredible demand for dedicated AI GPUs, the company is forecasting revenue growth of 170% for the current quarter compared to the same period last year. AMD is also trying to ride the wave of AI fever. AMD announced in June that it would begin shipping samples of its custom MI300X accelerators to customers in the third quarter. These accelerators were designed specifically to run artificial intelligence models.
“They’re making increasingly compelling hardware offerings that I think will become increasingly important to the market in the coming years,” Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said at the Code Conference in Dana Point, California. California, Wednesday.
Microsoft and AMD are long-time partners. Microsoft is interested in bringing more powerful chips to the market from a wider range of suppliers. For years, Microsoft has offered some AMD GPUs to customers of its Azure cloud service. In addition, the companies have been collaborating on game consoles for a long time – AMD supplies chips for Xbox consoles.
In May, AMD announced that Microsoft began offering cloud services to customers based on its DPU (Data Processing Unit) Pensando family. As part of the Code conference, The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel asked Scott how easy it would be to scale up adoption of AMD GPUs and abandon NVIDIA solutions. Microsoft’s CTO did not answer the question directly, only noting that developers using AI programming tools do not need to think about the hardware used in their systems. He also added that “competition is very important for the market.”
In the same month, Bloomberg reported that AMD and Microsoft were developing their own chip for working with AI, but Scott refused to say anything on this topic at the Code conference.
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