By Pablo G. Bejerano
Publication Date: 2026-02-07 04:00:00
The digital era is built atop monopolies. Tech corporations have reached incredible sizes, thanks to their domination various sectors. Google got its start with its search engine, Meta took off via social media. Microsoft came out of Windows and business software, and Amazon is synonymous with e-trade. And now, Nvidia is the largest suppler — by a long shot — of chips for artificial intelligence.
Its GPUs have proven to be the best option for training and running AI models. Developers from OpenAI to Google, Anthropic, Meta and Amazon, along with a host of specialized startups, are fighting to get their hands on Nvidia chips.
That high demand has made the manufacturer the most valuable company in the world. But its clients are hungry for alternatives. Nvidia has a long waiting list, and there’s another factor at play: there is no real competition to keep the price of its chips down. As Intel struggles in the sector, AMD is increasing its presence, and startups like Cerebras and Groq — which, incidentally, Nvidia all but swallowed up in a recent $20 billion deal — have developed specialized processors. It hasn’t been enough.
The biggest names in AI are dedicating more and more resources towards developing their own chips to meet their needs. At the end of last year, two announcements shook up the wildly profitable industry. Amazon debuted its Trainium3 and, most importantly, Google released the first results of its seventh-generation TPUs, Ironwood. Not to mention,…
