Intel Just Gutted Its AI Chip Ambitions

Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) has largely failed to tap into soaring demand for artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators. The company's acquisition of AI chip start-up Habana Labs back in 2019, three years before the AI boom kicked off in earnest, certainly seemed like a prescient move. Habana's Gaudi family of AI accelerators, which were tailor-made for AI workloads compared to more general-purpose GPUs, had all the makings of a big winner.Intel is now on the third generation of its Gaudi AI chips, and progress has been excruciatingly slow. The company set a goal of selling $500 million worth of AI accelerators last year, a target that it ended up missing. Meanwhile, Nvidia is churning up tens of billions of dollars in AI chip revenue each quarter, and AMD has guided for about $5 billion in AI chip sales for 2024.One big problem for Intel has been software. Gaudi is not a GPU, so the architecture is very different from the AI accelerators that currently dominate the market. Despite aggressive pricing from Intel, an immature software ecosystem has been holding Gaudi back. Intel has had some wins, including a deal with IBM to put Gaudi 3 chips in IBM's cloud data centers. Unfortunately for Intel, these wins just haven't been big enough to really move the needle.Continue readingWeiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei MotleyFool Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei MotleyFool