Nvidia and AMD square off in fight to take control of AI
Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s chiefs showcased new generations of the chips powering the global boom in AI development, deepening a rivalry that may decide the direction of artificial intelligence design and adoption.
Jensen Huang and Lisa Su — both born in Taiwan and now local celebrities for leading U.S. tech powerhouses — employed different tacks in conveying their expertise during back-to-back shows at the world’s largest computing conference this week in Taipei. Nvidia’s CEO repeatedly voiced his $2.7 trillion company’s dominance in the accelerators that OpenAI and Microsoft Corp. rely on to build generative AI services like ChatGPT. Huang went as far as to tease a chip envisioned for 2026 he dubbed Rubin — after Vera Rubin, the American woman who helped discover dark matter. The chip, which will succeed the Blackwell family, will be key to sustaining its runaway leadership. While Huang headlined much of his own two-hour presentation on Sunday, AMD’s Su chose to make hers more of a team effort. She brought out a stream of big-name partners from HP Inc. CEO Enrique Lores to Lenovo Group Ltd.’s Luca Rossi to convey the company’s focus on designing neural processors — a type of chip that runs AI services directly from laptops. At one point during her Computex address, Asustek Computer Inc. Chairman Jonney Shih called her “the pride of Taiwan” — a characterization often associated with Huang of Nvidia, whose market valuation is now about 10 times that of AMD’s.
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“People see Nvidia as a personification of Jensen. And while Lisa is the savior of AMD, she’s very clear that it’s about everyone around her,” said Ian Cutress, chief analyst at the consultancy More Than Moore. “AMD still have that underdog element about the business, and with AI it’s very much true.”
The back-to-back presentations — attended by hundreds and watched by thousands more across the globe — underscore the growing stakes in a technology that has the potential to redefine a slew of industries and create new devices that can near-instantly generate video and other content from simple commands. There’s a personal component to the competition too. Su and Huang are not only both Taiwanese, they were born in the same city of roughly 1.8 million on Taiwan’s southern coast and are distant relatives. That hasn’t made either one more willing to cede ground to the other.
Nvidia sees the rise of generative AI as a new industrial revolution and expects to play a major role as the technology shifts to personal computers, the CEO said in his keynote address at National Taiwan University. He returned to themes he set out a year ago at the same venue, including the idea that those without AI capabilities will be left behind.
Delegates to Computex remarked that Huang’s performance drove home Nvidia’s continued dominance — a position that appeared difficult for AMD or any other rival to shake in the short run. One fund manager told Bloomberg News that Huang generated a lot of buzz in particular around Rubin, even though the CEO didn’t go into detail about a chip slated for 2026.
Nvidia is selling customers a fully proprietary system, where businesses can buy its chips, networking gear and everything else required to run advanced AI development in data centers he’s called ‘AI factories.’ AMD, on the other hand, touts open standards that make its hardware interoperable with that of rivals like Intel Corp.
Huang said the upcoming Rubin AI platform will use HBM4, the next iteration of the essential high-bandwidth memory that’s grown into a bottleneck for AI accelerator production. Leading manufacturer SK Hynix Inc. is largely sold out through 2025. He otherwise didn’t offer detailed specifications for Nvidia’s upcoming products.
