Amid regulatory tensions between the US and China over the supply of advanced semiconductor technology that is critical for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, a top Indian security advisor said that the fight at the frontier has moved on from NVIDIA's widgets.
“NVIDIA is past tense. The new technology out there is wafer-scale integration… Semiconductor chips are made from wafers. You cut out a wafer and multiple chips come out. The best company right now is making a wafer scale chip for doing AI computation. Those are the kind of things we will see in the near future which will take semiconductors to the next level,” said Anshuman Tripathi, a member of the Ajit Doval-led National Security Advisory Board at the Moneycontrol and CNBC TV18 AI Alliance NCR Chapter in Gurugram on May 17.
“Those chips are not small. It's a 8-12 inch wafer. And the whole wafer is a chip. The new data centers will have those... which the US and China are fighting over right now. We need to catch up with them,” he said.
Over the past year, NVIDIA's market value has tripled to over $2 trillion as it became the poster child of the AI boom, thanks to its leading position in high-end semiconductors used to drive chatbots and the like. The firm has around 80 percent of the market for such silicon.
Tripathi, a veteran tech executive who also sits on the Board of SBI Ventures, believes US-based chip startup Cerebras Systems — which has raised over $700 million in funding to make wafer-sized chips — is what investors should be looking at.
To be sure, Cerebras is a private company that is reportedly headed to an initial public offer at $4 billion valuation. NVIDIA's market capitalisation is 550 times higher currently.
Recently, the Silicon Valley startup said that it will supply a supercomputing system to Aleph Alpha, a German technology startup that will use it to develop AI for the German military.
Cerebras has created a computing system that aims to rival Nvidia for training AI systems with huge amounts of data. The company has previously won a deal to supply G42, the government-backed firm in the United Arab Emirates, with AI supercomputers, though those machines will be physically located in the United States.
Abu Dhabi-based G42, a tech conglomerate with nine operating companies that include datacenter and cloud service businesses, says it plans to use the Cerebras systems to sell AI computing services to healthcare and energy companies. G42 has raised $800 million from US tech investment firm Silver Lake, which has backing from Mubadala, the UAE's sovereign wealth fund.
The company is also in talks with the Indian government on augmenting the country's artificial intelligence computing infrastructure, the chipmaking startup's founder said late last year.
"I was in Delhi 10 days ago and met with government officials. India doesn't have enough data centres and supercomputers. It's a tremendous opportunity. I hope we can do great work in India," Cerebras founder Andrew Feldman told Moneycontrol at the time.
"We met many AI thinkers and leaders in India. Getting government pronouncements and signing pieces of paper is the start. The hard work is after that when you build data centres, we have the hard work ahead of us," he added.
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