Could a new generation of ASICs burst Nvidia’s bubble and do for AI GPUs what ASICs did for bitcoin mining?

A Chinese startup founded by a former Google engineer claims to have created a new ultra-efficient and relatively low cost AI chip using older manufacturing techniques. Meanwhile, Google itself is now reportedly considering whether to make its own specialised AI chips available to buy. Together, these chips could represent the start of a new processing paradigm which could do for the AI industry what ASICs did for bitcoin mining.

In both cases, we’re talking about chips broadly known as TPUs or tensor processing units. They’re a kind of ASIC, or application-specific integrated circuit, that’s designed at hardware level to do a very narrow set of AI-related tasks very well. By contrast, Nvidia’s GPUs, even its AI-specific GPUs as opposed to its gaming GPUs, are more general purpose in nature.