Silicon Wars: Nvidia GPUs vs Google TPUs – The Times of India

The landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure experienced a seismic shift in recent months. Nvidia, which is being seen as the ‘undisputed king’ of the AI hardware boom (specifically Graphic Processing Units, or GPUs), saw billions erased from its market value after a report claimed that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is partnering with Google to train its next-generation Llama AI models on the search giant’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs).Nvidia’s GPUs have been the gold standard with major tech giants, and even new startups, are ordering these specialised chips in bulk. This has led to a global shortage and provided an opportunity for other players like AMD to take advantage of this demand-supply gap. Google is another player that has risen to the occasion, and opened its door for tech players to use its specialised AI chips to train their models.

Meta’s pivot toward alternative hardware highlights a vulnerability in Nvidia’s armor and signals a maturing of the market, suggesting that the “one size fits all” era of AI hardware may be ending and strategic use of hardware can not only save money but also time. To understand why a company like Meta would look away from Nvidia, and why Nvidia would spend $20 billion to acquire a startup like Groq, we must look under the hood. In this article, we are dissecting the fundamental differences between…