NVIDIA’s reign on the AI chip market is currently unchallenged, but with many of the top companies planning to go custom with their AI infrastructure, particularly the chips that power them, NVIDIA is taking the initiative to spin off a business unit that will cater to these customers looking for a semi-custom solution for their infrastructure.
Sam Altman of OpenAI has spoken about eventually going custom, with Amazon already unveiling a custom AI processor of their own months ago. The benefit of purpose-built processors is that they lose most of the unneeded bulk of general-purpose solutions, making them much more efficient along with being generally faster in their specific workloads versus NVIDIA’s general use AI HPC solutions like H100 and A100.
A Reuters report says that NVIDIA may be looking to spin-off a new business unit that will handle semi-custom orders from its largest customers, utilizing their tech and relationship with foundries. This also allows NVIDIA to further tap into foundry allocations as orders its custom BU will be using the customer’s allocation, not NVIDIA’s, allowing them to utilize their allocation for more supplies or anything else for that matter.
NVIDIA is looking at a potential $30 billion market for this business unit. While NVIDIA may lose out on HPC orders with this move, start-ups who aren’t in the level of making their own chips are more than happy to fill in those H100 orders. This also ensures NVIDIA is ahead of the curve as Intel is also looking to court these companies into choosing Intel Foundry Solution to co-develop and product their custom AI chips.