Can Nvidia be dethroned? Meet the startups vying for its crown

“HE WHO controls the GPUs, controls the universe.” This spin on a famous line from “Dune”, a science-fiction classic, is commonly heard these days. Access to GPUs, and in particular those made by Nvidia, the leading supplier, is vital for any company that wants to be taken seriously in artificial intelligence (AI). Analysts talk of companies being “GPU-rich” or “GPU-poor”, depending on how many of the chips they have. Tech bosses boast of their giant stockpiles. Nvidia’s dominance has driven its market value to more than $2trn. In its latest results, due on May 22nd, it is expected to announce year-on-year revenue growth of more than 200%.

GPUs do the computational heavy-lifting needed to train and operate large AI models. Yet, oddly, this is not what they were designed for. The acronym stands for “graphics processing unit”, because such chips were originally designed to process video-game graphics. It turned out that, fortuitously for Nvidia, they could be repurposed for AI workloads.