AI Chips: Challenges and Opportunities

The exploding use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is ushering in a new era for semiconductor devices that will bring many new opportunities but also many challenges. Speaking at the AI Design Forum hosted by Applied Materials and SEMI during SEMICON West in July, Dr. John E. Kelly, III, Senior Vice President, Cognitive Solutions and IBM Research, talked about how AI will dramatically change the world. “This is an era of computing which is at a scale that will dwarf the previous era, in ways that will change all of our businesses and all of our industries, and all of our lives,” he said. “This is the era that’s going to power our semiconductor industry forward. The number of opportunities is enormous.”

Also speaking at the event, Gary Dickerson, CEO of Applied Materials, said AI “needs innovation in the edge and in the cloud, in generating data on the edge, storing the data, and processing that data to unlock the value.   At the same time Moore’s Law is slowing.” This creates the “perfect opportunity,” he said.

Ajit Manocha, President and CEO of SEMI, calls it a “rebirth” of the semiconductor industry. “Artificial Intelligence is changing everything – and bringing semiconductors back into the deserved spotlight,” he notes in a recent article. “AI’s potential market of hundreds of zettabytes and trillions of dollars relies on new semiconductor architectures and compute platforms. Making these AI semiconductor engines will require a wildly innovative range of new materials, equipment, and design methodologies.”

”Hardware is becoming sexy again,” said Dickerson. “In the last 18 months there’s been more money going into chip start ups than the previous 18 years.” In addition to AI chips from traditional IC companies such as Intel and Qualcomm, more than 45 start-ups are working to develop new AI chips, with VC investments of more than $1.5B — at least five of them have raised more than $100 million from investors. Tech giants such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Baidu and Alibaba are also developing AI chips.

Dickerson said having the winning AI chip 12 months ahead of anyone else could be a $100 billion opportunity. “What we’re driving inside of Applied Materials is speed and time to market. What is one month worth?   What is one minute worth?”

IBM’s Kelly said there’s $2 trillion of decision support opportunity for artificial intelligence on top of the existing $1.5-2 billion information technology industry. “Literally every industry in the world is going to be impacted and transformed by this,” he said.