Chip race: Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Nvidia battle it out for AI chip supremacy

China is investigating Nvidia over antitrust violations, reportedly over claims the chipmaker failed to follow conditions set during China’s approval for its $6.9 billion acquisition of Israeli network hardware company Mellanox in 2020.

While announcing the DGX A100 GPU after acquiring Mellanox, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said this while explaining its importance to his company:

On Monday, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger abruptly decided to retire after less than four years on the job. That was the official story, anyhow. Within hours, Reuters, Bloomberg, and The New York Times had a different one: the board of directors pushed him out. 

Three and a half years ago, Gelsinger announced an ambitious plan to turn around the troubled chipmaker within four years — now, he’s reportedly been kicked out of the company before he could see it through. It happened so abruptly that Intel doesn’t have a planned successor in mind, and so completely that Gelsinger won’t even stick around as an adviser. He’s gone.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has retired after over four decades at the company and stepped down from the board of directors effective December 1st, 2024. A report from Bloomberg says that after meeting with the board to discuss Intel’s progress in catching up with Nvidia and regaining lost market share, Gelsinger “was given the option to retire or be removed, and chose to announce the end of his career at Intel.”

Gelsinger rejoined Intel as CEO in February 2021, taking over from Bob Swan to turn around the already struggling chipmaker — an effort that hasn’t gone as planned. It’s largely missed out on the AI chip boom that fueled Nvidia’s rise, failed to launch new technology on schedule, struggled with recent CPU instability issues, and was skipped over as Microsoft’s launch partner for AI PCs.

Nvidia has become the world’s most valuable company on the back of AI chips, passing Microsoft and Apple along the way, and in today’s Q3 2025 earnings, the company suggested its record AI revenue and profits are only the beginning.

While The Information recently reported that its new flagship Blackwell AI servers might have cooling issues, the company didn’t address that on today’s call — instead, Nvidia assured investors that Blackwell is in “full production,” is “full steam” ahead, and that the company would continue to deliver more of the chips each quarter from here on out.

Nvidia made a fortune on the AI boom. AMD’s rival AI chip became the fastest ramping product in its history, already pulling in $1 billion per quarter and inspiring AMD to remake itself as an AI company too. But Intel, which suggested it would pull in $1 billion, even $2 billion on the back of AI in 2024, now says it won’t even meet its more modest $500 million goal for its Gaudi AI accelerator this year.

“We will not achieve our target of $500 million in revenue for Gaudi in 2024,” CEO Pat Gelsinger just said on the company’s Q3 2024 earnings call today.

OpenAI is reportedly working with Broadcom to develop new custom silicon designed to handle its large AI workloads for inference and secured manufacturing capacity with TSMC, according to sources speaking to Reuters. OpenAI has reportedly built a chip development team of about 20 people, including lead engineers who previously worked on Google’s Tensor processors for AI.

Still, on its current timeline, the custom-designed hardware may not start production until 2026.

On Friday afternoon, The Wall Street Journal reported Intel had been approached by fellow chip giant Qualcomm about a possible takeover. While any deal is described as “far from certain,” according to the paper’s unnamed sources, it would represent a tremendous fall for a company that had been the most valuable chip company in the world, based largely on its x86 processor technology that for years had triumphed over Qualcomm’s Arm chips outside of the phone space.

The New York Times corroborated the report on Friday evening, adding that “Qualcomm has not yet made an official offer for Intel.”

Intel is spinning off its chipmaking business as part of its plans to reverse billions in losses and a tumbling stock price. In an announcement on Monday, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said the Intel Foundry will become an independent subsidiary with “clearer separation and independence” from Intel.

With the change, the Intel Foundry will have its own operating board and report its financial earnings separately from Intel. Intel will also stop work on the factories it’s building in Poland and Germany for two years “based on anticipated market demand.” The company is still moving forward with its plants in Arizona, Oregon, New Mexico, and Ohio, however.

What’s next after the PS5 Pro? A report from Reuters focuses on Sony’s plans beyond this fall’s new $700 system, saying that the battle to win a contract for the chip powering a future PlayStation 6 came down to AMD vs. Intel, with others like Broadcom eliminated earlier, with AMD eventually winning out.

According to Reuters, since AMD makes the chip in the PS5 and PS5 Pro, maintaining backward compatibility in a possible move was part of “months” of discussions in 2022 between executives and engineers at Sony and Intel. However, Intel’s bid was blocked because they couldn’t agree on how much profit Intel would make from each chip it would design as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) handled the manufacturing process.

AMD is saying the quiet part out loud: it’s now prioritizing AI chips ahead of flagship GPUs for gamers. The company’s just laid out a new business strategy, where it will merge its RDNA gaming graphics and CNDA data center efforts into a single universal “UDNA” that’s aimed at AI first.

In two interviews with Tom’s Hardware (you’ll definitely want to read both), AMD computing and graphics boss Jack Huynh doesn’t beat around the bush. With gaming graphics, he explains, the goal is now building scale and market share at lower price points — not the “King of the Hill” flagship GPUs that haven’t convinced enough buyers to leave Nvidia behind.

An antitrust investigation by the Department of Justice focusing on Nvidia’s AI dominance as the hardware company of choice is escalating, reports Bloomberg. The outlet reports that Nvidia and other companies have received legally binding requests for information as its sources say regulators are investigating whether Nvidia is “making it harder to switch to other suppliers and penalizes buyers that don’t exclusively use its artificial intelligence chips.”

“Nvidia wins on merit, as reflected in our benchmark results and value to customers, and customers can choose whatever solution is best for them. We have inquired with the U.S. Department of Justice and have not been subpoenaed. Nonetheless, we are happy to answer any questions regulators may have about our business,” said Nvidia spokesperson John Rizzo, as reported previously by CNBC.

The popular benchmarking utility Geekbench has launched a new cross-platform tool to evaluate the performance of devices under AI-heavy workloads. Geekbench AI measures a device’s CPU, GPU, and NPU (neural processing unit) to determine how well it can handle machine learning applications.

Geekbench developer Primate Labs has been working on the software using the name Geekbench ML, which launched in preview in 2021, but shifted the name to AI for reasons that seem obvious. To explore how different hardware responds to different AI-related tasks, it evaluates performance based on both accuracy and speed, with support for different frameworks, including ONNX, CoreML, TensorFlow Lite, and OpenVino.

AMD just announced its second quarter 2024 earnings today, and the highlight was this: nearly half the company’s sales are now data center products — not chips for personal computers, not game consoles, not embedded chips for industry or vehicles.

The company’s data center business has doubled in a single year, and this quarter’s growth was primarily due to a single chip: the AMD Instinct MI300 accelerator, which competes with Nvidia’s infamously influential H100 AI chip. The AMD chip just did over $1 billion in sales in a single quarter, according to CEO Lisa Su, up from its previous milestone of $1 billion cumulatively since its December 2023 debut. (AMD says its Epyc server CPUs also contributed.)