By Will Knight
Publication Date: 2026-04-15 18:00:00
Nvidia is the undisputed king of AI chips. But thanks to the AI he helped build, the champion could soon face growing competition.
Modern AI is based on Nvidia designs, a dynamic that has given the company a market capitalization well over $4 trillion. Each new generation of Nvidia chips enables companies to train more powerful AI models using hundreds or thousands of processors networked together in massive data centers. One reason for Nvidia’s success is that the company provides software that helps program each new generation of chips. This may soon no longer be such a nuanced skill.
A startup called Wafer trains AI models to do one of the most difficult and important tasks in AI – optimizing code to run as efficiently as possible on a given silicon chip.
Emilio Andere, co-founder and CEO of Wafer, says the company performs reinforcement learning on open source models to teach them how to write kernel code, or software that interacts directly with hardware in an operating system. Other…