The other two chipmakers who've claimed for years they're catching up with NVIDIA in AI. So far the market share says otherwise.
AMD comes in with a line of chips called Instinct, the newest ones named MI350 and MI400. On paper they look serious: more memory than NVIDIA's competing chips, which in practice means they can fit a bigger AI model onto one chip without slicing it up across machines. Microsoft, Meta and several cloud providers are already buying them - mainly because they come out cheaper for a certain kind of workload, not because they're faster.
Intel is the other story, and the sadder one. This is the company that for decades was synonymous with the processor in your computer. The AI wave caught it unprepared. It tried a chip called Gaudi, built for training models, and it didn't sell. The next project, Falcon Shores, was cancelled before it ever hit the market. Now Intel is changing direction: it's betting on a chip called Crescent Island, but not for training - for actually running the model - the phase where a finished model simply answers questions. A cheaper, more accessible niche, where NVIDIA is less unbeatable. It ships toward the end of 2026.
Why should you care. If only one company makes the chips the whole AI industry runs on, it decides the price, decides who gets chips first and who waits in line. AMD and Intel aren't saviors, but every genuine effort from a competitor is a reason prices don't shoot through the roof - and the cloud services you use every day don't depend entirely on the whims of one supplier.
The numbers, though, are harsh. NVIDIA holds around 80% of revenue in this market. AMD scrapes by somewhere between 5 and 7%. Intel in AI chips is for now almost invisible against that backdrop, despite its size as a company.
A familiar tune
The temptation to try an AMD chip is real, because the price looks good on paper. The problem is never the chip itself, the problem is the software around it. NVIDIA has such a mature ecosystem of tools that switching chips means rewriting half your code. AMD and Intel are catching up exactly there, slowly, with every new version.
That's why I look at every announcement of theirs with a grain of salt. The promises of catching up have repeated for several years now. I'll believe it when I see a developer choose AMD or Intel for quality, not for price.