The biggest threat to NVIDIA’s dominance in GPU chip based neural network AI comes from two recent startups, Graphcore and Cerebras. Graphcore builds a Wafer-on-Wafer chip (WoW) that literally bonds two chip wafers together to dramatically reduce the distance between the power supply and GPUs. This eliminates the conductors that create impedance and heat on the chip and allows operation at ridiculously fast clock speeds (10-100x) over NVIDIA’s. Cerebras is even more amazing and has designed a Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) that is the size of a full wafer with 10s of trillions of transistors. This combined with a very sparse software matrix architecture allows them to build electronic neural nets with more connections than there are synapses in the human brain.
Both of these startups are US founded companies like NVIDIA but, unfortunately, they are both built exclusively by Taiwan Semiconductor in Taiwan. If the CCP can destroy NVIDIA’s market and take back Taiwan and its industries like TSM, they will own the hardware that will make Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) feasible in the future.
Taiwan Semi also recently announced that they intend to develop chip manufacturing technology to compete with Lam Research. Not good news for my #1 holding