Rather than measure the funding rounds and valuations of AI startups building foundation models in US dollars, perhaps we should just convert that right into GPU-hours rented to train models, since this accounts for the vast majority of spending that OpenAI, Anthropic, and a handful of others do in their day to day operations. …
In a scene from the movie Gladiator, Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, worried about the fragility of his empire, tells his general, Maximus: “There was once a dream that was Rome. …
There is a bit of AI spending one-upmanship going on among the hyperscalers and cloud builders – and now the foundation model builders who are partnering with their new sugar daddies to be able to afford to build vast AI accelerator estates to push the state of the art in model capabilities and intelligence. …
Updated with just-announced Intel roadmap changes.
It is often said that companies – particularly large companies with enormous IT budgets – do not buy products, they buy roadmaps. …
It is hard to bet against the GenAI boom, and thus far it is also hard for anyone other than Nvidia to profit from it. …
When the hyperscalers and cloud builders were smaller and the Arm collective had failed to storm the datacenter and AMD was not yet on its path to resurgence, it was Intel that controlled the cadence of new compute engine introductions into the datacenter. …
If Amazon is going to make you pay for the custom AI advantage that it wants to build over rivals Google and Microsoft, then it needs to have the best models possible running on its homegrown accelerators. …
Think of it as the ultimate offload model.
One of the geniuses of the cloud – perhaps the central genius – is that a big company that would have a large IT budget, perhaps on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars per year, and that has a certain amount of expertise creates a much, much larger IT organization with billions of dollars – and with AI now tens of billions of dollars – in investments and rents out the vast majority of that capacity to third parties, who essentially allow that original cloud builder to get their own IT operations for close to free. …
UPDATED With its Graviton 4 homegrown Graviton 4 Arm server processors, Amazon Web Services has put into the field a CPU that can compete with all but the toppest of bin parts from AMD for X86 CPUs and Ampere Computing and Nvidia for Arm CPUs, and it is driving price/performance that will in turn drive their adoption for Amazon’s various business units and for its IT infrastructure rental customers on AWS. …
Intel needs a whole lot of big wins for both its chip design and selling business and its increasingly arm’s length foundry business if it is going to turn itself around and be competitive with AMD and Nvidia on the left hand and with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co on its right. …
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