By Geoffrey Seiler
Publication Date: 2026-04-07 17:00:00
Since the start of the artificial intelligence (AI) build-out, I viewed Advanced Micro Devices (AMD 0.54%) mostly as an afterthought, a company destined to just live deep in Nvidia‘s (NVDA 1.23%) shadow. The company was the No. 2 player in the graphics processing unit (GPU) space, but the gap was so wide between it and Nvidia that it felt it would never make any serious inroads.
After all, when it came to AI, Nvidia had actually outmaneuvered AMD a long time ago, way before AI became mainstream. AMD got into the GPU game in 2006 when it acquired ATI Technologies. While AMD was busy integrating ATI into its business, Nvidia released its CUDA software platform to allow developers to easily program its chips beyond their original purpose of speeding up graphics rendering in video games. It gave the software program away for free and embedded into places that were doing early research on AI. This led to most foundational AI code being written on its software programmed for its chips.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
AMD did not release its competing ROCm software platform until a decade later, at which time it was very far behind. Meanwhile, as the AI race heated up, ROCm became a liability, as the software platform was generally viewed as buggy and unusable out of the box. Almost all code was still written in CUDA, and converting it to ROCm was a pain. However, more recently, more programming has started to be written on newer open-source AI frameworks, like OpenAI’s Triton,…
