Tech coalition aiming to break Nvidia’s grip on AI

Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc.

Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps.

Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going after the chip giant’s secret weapon: the software that keeps developers tied to Nvidia chips. They are part of an expanding group of financiers and companies hacking away at Nvidia’s dominance in AI.

“We’re actually showing developers how you migrate out from an Nvidia platform,” Qualcomm head of AI and machine learning Vinesh Sukumar said in an interview.

Starting with a piece of technology developed by Intel called OneAPI, the UXL Foundation — a consortium of tech companies — plans to build a suite of software and tools that would be able to power multiple types of AI accelerator chips, executives involved with the group said.

The open-source project aims to make computer code run on any machine, regardless of what chip and hardware powers it.

“It’s about specifically — in the context of machine learning frameworks — how do we create an open ecosystem, and promote productivity and choice in hardware,” Google director and chief technologist of high-performance computing Bill Magro said in an interview.

Google is one of the founding members of UXL and helps determine the technical direction of the project, Magro said.

UXL’s technical steering committee is preparing to nail down technical specifications in the first half of this year. Engineers plan to refine the technical details to a “mature” state by the end of the year, executives said.

These executives stressed the need to build a solid foundation to include contributions from multiple companies that can also be deployed on any chip or hardware.

Beyond the initial companies involved, UXL will court cloud-computing companies such as Amazon. com Inc and Microsoft’s Azure, as well as additional chipmakers.

Since its launch in September last year, UXL has begun to receive technical contributions from third parties that include foundation members and outsiders keen on using the open-source technology, executives said.

Intel’s OneAPI is already usable, and the second step is to create a standard programming model of computing designed for AI.

UXL plans to put its resources toward addressing the most pressing computing problems dominated by a few chipmakers, such as the latest AI apps and high-performance computing applications. Those early plans feed into the organization’s longer-term goal of winning over a critical mass of developers to its platform. UXL eventually aims to support Nvidia hardware and code in the long run.

Asked about the open source and venture-funded software efforts to break Nvidia’s AI dominance, Nvidia executive Ian Buck said in a statement: “The world is getting accelerated. New ideas in accelerated computing are coming from all across the ecosystem, and that will help advance AI and the scope of what accelerated computing can achieve.”