Big Bets on A.I. Open a New Frontier for Chip Start-Ups, Too
It acquired Nervana, a 50-employee Silicon Valley start-up that had started building an A. I.
chip from scratch, for $400 million, according to a report from the tech news site Recode.
Researchers at places like Microsoft and Google, which has built its own chip just for A. I., “train” neural networks by extreme trial
and error, testing the algorithms across vast numbers of chips for hours and even days on end.
Nvidia sold $143 million in chips for the massive computer data centers run by companies
like Google in the year leading up to that summer — double the year before.
“Machine learning and A. I.
has reopened questions around how to build computers,” said Bill Coughran, who helped oversee the global infrastructure at Google for several years
and is now a partner at Sequoia, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm.
The first big change will most likely come in the data center, where companies like Graphcore
and Cerebras, which has been quiet about its plans, hope to accelerate the creation of new forms of A. I.
After that, a second Silicon Valley start-up, Cerebras, grabbed five Nervana engineers as it, too, designed a chip just for A. I.
Raising money in 2015 and early 2016 was a nightmare, said Mike Henry, chief executive at the A. I.
chip start-up Mythic.
