Nvidia expands in artificial intelligence as Intel defends data centre turf

Nvidia Corp dominates chips for training computers to think like humans, but it faces an entrenched competitor in a major avenue for expansion in the artificial intelligence chip market: Intel Corp. Nvidia chips dominate the AI training chip market, where huge amounts of data help algorithms “learn” a task such how to recognise a human voice, but one of the biggest growth areas in the field will be deploying computers that implement the “learned” tasks. But Intel processors already are widely used for taking a trained artificial intelligence algorithm and putting it to use, for example by scanning incoming audio and translating that into text-based requests, what is called “inference.” Intel’s chips can still work just fine there, especially when paired with huge amounts of memory, said Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz, chief technology officer of Nexar Inc, an Israeli startup using smartphone cameras to try to prevent car collisions. Nvidia, which posted an 89 percent rise in profit Thursday, hasn’t given a specific estimate for the inference chip market but CEO Jensen Huang said on an earnings call with analysts on Thursday that believes it “is going to be a very large market for us.” Nvidia sales of inference chips are rising. But Nvidia faces a headwind selling inference chips because the data centre market is blanketed with the CPUs Intel has been selling for 20 years.