AMD CEO Debuts Nvidia Chip Rival, Gives Eye-Popping Forecast

(Bloomberg) — Advanced Micro Devices Inc., taking aim at a burgeoning market dominated by Nvidia Corp., unveiled new so-called accelerator chips that it said will be able to run artificial intelligence software faster than rival products.

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The company introduced a long-anticipated lineup called the MI300 at an event Wednesday held in San Jose, California. Chief Executive Officer Lisa Su also gave an eye-popping forecast for the size of the AI chip industry, saying it could climb to more than $400 billion in the next four years. That’s more than twice as high as a projection AMD gave in August, showing how rapidly expectations are changing for AI hardware.

The launch is one of the most important in AMD’s five-decade history, setting up a showdown with Nvidia in the red-hot market for AI accelerators. Such chips help develop AI models by bombarding them with data, a task they handle more adeptly than traditional computer processors.

AMD is showing increasing confidence that the MI300 lineup can win over some of the biggest names in technology, potentially diverting billions in spending toward the company. Customers using the processors will include Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and Meta Platforms Inc., AMD said.

Nvidia shares dipped 1.4% to $458.98 in New York on Wednesday, while AMD’s stock fell less than 1% to $117.24.

Surging demand for Nvidia chips by data center operators helped propel its shares this year, sending the company’s market value past $1.1 trillion. The big question is how long it will essentially have the accelerator market to itself.

AMD sees an opening: Large language models — used by AI chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT — need a huge amount of computer memory, and that’s where the chipmaker believes it has an advantage.

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The new AMD chip has more than 150 billion transistors and 2.4 times as much memory as Nvidia’s H100, the current market leader. It also has 1.6 as much memory bandwidth,…