Microsoft And AMD Plan To Shift Nvidia In The AI Chip Market

Illustration. (Trag Photography / Unsplash)

JAKARTA - Microsoft is reportedly collaborating with AMD in developing an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based processor. This partnership is claimed to be a strategy to shift Nvidia GPU chips that currently dominate the market.

The AI processor with the code name Athena was self-developed by Microsoft, while AMD provided financial support.

The Redmond giant, United States (US), has reportedly built a chip division with nearly 1,000 employees to work on the Athens Project.

With an investment of about $2 billion from Microsoft, it will be used for the development of dedicated hardware used for AI training and inference.

Like other big tech companies, Microsoft will continue to rely on Nvidia's graphics processing unit to run the AI model.

The need for silicon that can deal with AI has become more critical than ever in the past six months, especially in Microsoft, which provides computational resources for OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbots. This technology requires thousands of Nvidia GPUs.

However, Microsoft also needs chips to run its own app using the big language model GPT-4 at the heart of ChatGPT.

Big language models fall into a class of generative AI technologies that can create text-like content in response to human input.

Microsoft's Bing Chat combines the GPT-4 model, and software makers have announced a safety and productivity program that will use it as well.

For information, AMD has become a supplier of chips for Microsoft, as well as other cloud providers, such as Google and Oracle. This was quoted from CNBC International and GizChina, Saturday, May 6.