Nvidia, OpenAI and Their Rivals Expand AI Turf Wars

Nvidia, a chip giant, says it can develop a cloud services and software business to rival Amazon Web Services. OpenAI, an artificial intelligence developer, has been developing server chips and a browser to reduce its dependence on Nvidia and Google, respectively. And Elon Musk hired a data center team to build one of the biggest supercomputing server clusters for developing conversational AI.

It seems like every major competitor in the AI field is moving into the territory of its rivals or customers. They’re trying to either take a piece of the growing market for consumer and enterprise AI services, including server hardware and personal devices, or create a new industry, such as humanoid robots. In many other cases, especially when it comes to AI server chips, companies are trying to lessen their dependence on key suppliers to save money.

As the two charts below show, several large tech companies are competing neck and neck to develop an AI hardware and software “stack,” while others are trying to catch up. In the below chart, the darker the square, the more advanced the company’s business or technology is in that field. Blank squares or lightly colored squares show the gaps these companies have in developing core components for AI, which they might fill through new internal efforts or an acquisition.