Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. — Bloomberg
NEW YORK: Nvidia Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s (AMD) chiefs showcased new generations of the chips powering the global boom in artificial intelligence (AI) development, deepening a rivalry that’s shaping the future of AI design and adoption.
Jensen Huang and Lisa Su, both born in Taiwan and now local celebrities for leading US tech powerhouses, employed different tacks in conveying their expertise during back-to-back shows at the world’s largest computing conference this week in Taipei.
Nvidia’s chief executive officer (CEO) repeatedly voiced his US$2.8 trillion company’s dominance in the accelerators that OpenAI and Microsoft Corp rely on to build generative AI services like ChatGPT.
Huang went as far as to tease a chip envisioned for 2026 he dubbed Rubin – after Vera Rubin, the American woman who helped discover dark matter.
The chip, which will succeed the Blackwell family, will be key to sustaining its runaway leadership.
While Huang headlined much of his own two-hour presentation on Sunday, AMD’s Su chose to make hers more of a team effort.
She brought out a stream of big-name partners from HP Inc CEO Enrique Lores to Lenovo Group Ltd’s Luca Rossi to convey the company’s focus on designing neural processors – a type of chip that runs AI services directly from laptops.
During her Computex address, Asustek Computer Inc chairman Jonney Shih called her “the pride of Taiwan” – a characterisation often associated with Huang of Nvidia, whose market valuation is now about 10 times that of AMD’s.
“People see Nvidia as a personification of Jensen. And while Lisa is the saviour of AMD, she’s very clear that it’s about everyone around her,” said Ian Cutress, chief analyst at the consultancy More Than Moore. “AMD still have that underdog element about the business, and with AI it’s very much true.”
The back-to-back presentations, attended by hundreds and watched by thousands more across the globe, underscored the growing stakes in a technology that has the potential to redefine a slew of industries and create new devices that can near-instantly generate video and other content from simple commands.
There’s a personal component to the competition too.
Su and Huang are not only both Taiwanese, they were born in the same city of roughly 1.8 million on Taiwan’s southern coast and are distant relatives.
That hasn’t made either one more willing to cede ground to the other.
Su was originally tapped by organisers to kick off the week-long conference, one of the most important summits for tech executives around the world.
Instead, the Nvidia CEO organised his own presentation the Sunday night before the gathering’s official opening to talk about the chip maker’s strategic plans.
Huang, who had keynote Computex a year earlier, spoke at National Taiwan University just hours before the conference opened, essentially stealing the spotlight from his closest competitor.
AMD’s Su on Monday referred obliquely to the episode during an OpenAI demo of a chatbot.
“Let’s start by letting the tool know that we’re interested in Taiwan, and that we’re going to be attending Computex,” Su said.
“And you might ask something about the opening keynote,” she quipped, drawing laughter from the audience.
Nvidia sees the rise of generative AI as a new industrial revolution and expects to play a major role as the technology shifts to personal computers, the CEO said in his keynote address at National Taiwan University.
He returned to themes he set out a year ago at the same venue, including the idea that those without AI capabilities will be left behind.
Delegates to Computex remarked that Huang’s performance drove home Nvidia’s continued dominance – a position that appeared difficult for AMD or any other rival to shake in the short run.
One fund manager told Bloomberg News that Huang generated a lot of buzz in particular around Rubin, even though the CEO didn’t go into detail about a chip slated for 2026.
Shares of Nvidia rose 4.9% in New York on Monday, leaving them up 132% this year. AMD declined 2%.
Nvidia is selling customers a fully proprietary system, where businesses can buy its chips, networking gear and everything else required to run advanced AI development in data centres he’s called “AI factories”.
AMD, on the other hand, touts open standards that make its hardware interoperable with that of rivals like Intel Corp.
Huang said the upcoming Rubin AI platform will use HBM4, the next iteration of the essential high-bandwidth memory that’s grown into a bottleneck for AI accelerator production. — Bloomberg
