A.I. Chip Race Redraws Competitive Map Among Tech Firms, Chipmakers

It’s been a long time since tech’s biggest companies could be sorted into discrete buckets according to the products they pioneered—-Google, the search software giant; Apple, the computer and mobile device innovator; e-commerce leader Amazon; business software stalwart Microsoft; and social media engine Facebook.

Since then, these major innovators have built on a common resource—increasingly powerful data processing chips—to branch out into a host of new consumer and business areas. These include Web-based data storage and computing; Web-connected virtual assistants that talk; music and video streaming; self-driving cars; virtual reality; and augmented reality.

A diagram of the current competitive relationships among these giants might look like a tangled plate of spaghetti, or like overlapping Venn diagrams. For example, Google competes with Microsoft and Amazon in cloud hosting; Apple’s talking virtual assistant competes with Amazon’s and Google’s; and Facebook competes with Amazon and Apple in video streaming.

Now, some of these tech giants are expanding outside their own competitive circles. Over the last year, they’ve been moving significantly into the turf of companies that have long provided the foundation of their activities—chipmakers such as Intel and Nvidia.

The trigger for this movement is artificial intelligence and the demanding tasks tackled by devices that use A.I. software, as Wired has observed. Virtual assistants that can understand human speech, and cars that can “see” the difference between a highway median line and a roadway curb, require advanced processors organized something like a human brain, using neural networks.

Google and Microsoft have developed their own chips designed to support the A.I. capabilities of their newest products, such as Microsoft’s HoloLens, a “mixed reality” headset that brings holograms to life in the real environments of users, who can interact with them. And Apple may have quietly entered the A.I. chip race behind the scenes, as Bloomberg and other news outlets speculate.

In response, established chipmakers, including Nvidia and Intel, are pressing forward with their own processor innovations, to prevent the tech titans that have disrupted so many industries from rolling through their own. Nvidia is defending the dominance it gained as chipmaker for this early artificial intelligence era when its powerful graphics processing units were adapted for A.I. In May, the company unveiled the Tesla V100, designed for speedier work in a type of A.I. data processing called deep learning.

Established chipmakers are also collaborating with big tech companies themselves. Nvidia has announced several collaborations with Amazon, and San Diego-based Qualcomm is reportedly working together with Facebook as Qualcomm develops chips suited for machine learning.

Meanwhile, startup inventors such as Palo Alto, CA-based Groq, Redwood City, CA-based Mythic; Campbell, CA-based Wave Computing; and U.K.-based Graphcore are filling out the field in the A.I. chip horse race. Some startups have already been snapped up in acquisitions.

For example, Intel spent $16.