Nvidia rose on Wednesday. The chip maker appeared to shrug off a challenge from Amazon.com when it comes to artificial-intelligence hardware.
Nvidia’s chips are the favored choice for training artificial-intelligence models.
Nvidia shares were up 3.5% at $145.14 at the close. The stock rose 1.2% on Tuesday.
Nvidia remains the dominant provider of graphics-processing units (GPUs) for training artificial-intelligence models but the market is waiting to see how quickly it can ramp up supplies of its Blackwell chips to meet demand. Meanwhile, would-be rivals are promoting their own hardware.
Amazon on Tuesday announced plans for a massive AI supercomputer made up of hundreds of thousands of its in-house Trainium 2 chips. It will be used by AI start-up Anthropic, in which the e-commerce company recently invested an additional $4 billion.
Amazon Web Services—the company’s cloud-computing arm—said it is working on Trainium 3 hardware and servers, which will be available in late 2025 and be four times more powerful than their predecessor. Amazon rents out access to its own chips, which are designed in partnership with Marvell Technology, alongside Nvidia’s to its cloud-computing customers.
“Today, there’s really only one choice on the GPU side, and it’s just Nvidia…We think that customers would appreciate having multiple choices,” said Matt Garman, chief executive of Amazon Web Services, according to The Wall Street Journal.
However, Amazon remains a customer of Nvidia and a big one at that. Amazon will likely will spend between $1 billion and $2 billion on Marvell-designed chips in 2024, compared with more than $20 billion on Nvidia chips, according to BofA Securities analyst Justin Post.
The two companies are also stressing their joint efforts. Amazon Web Services this week announced new data-center cooling designs working with the most powerful configurations of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips. For now, there should still be plenty of AI chip demand to go around and Nvidia’s dominance remains shielded by developers’ dependence on the company’s CUDA software for building applications.
Among other chip makers, Advanced Micro Devices was up 1.4% and Broadcom also gained 1.4%. Marvell rose 23% after reporting stronger-than-expected earnings.
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