Under the five-year deal, OpenAI will purchase up to 6 gigawatts of AMD's most advanced AI processors, a level of computing capacity equivalent to the peak electricity demand of London. The partnership is designed to provide OpenAI with the infrastructure it needs to scale its technology as competition in the AI sector intensifies. Shares in AMD surged 27 per cent to $209.39 in New York trading after the deal was announced, adding tens of billions of dollars to the chipmaker's market value.
Pricier components seem to be a driving force behind the bigger price tags. The new speakers, for instance, feature AZ3 and AZ23 Pro processors that include a new "AI Accelerator designed to run AI edge models," according to Amazon's announcement. The processors are supposed to enable "better conversation detection" alongside improved mics for blocking out background noise "and improving Alexa's ability to detect the wake-word by over 50 percent."
Nvidia started producing chips tailored for the Chinese market after former US President Joe Biden banned the company from exporting its most powerful products to China, in an effort to rein in Beijing's progress on AI. Beijing's regulators have recently summoned domestic chipmakers such as Huawei and Cambricon, as well as Alibaba and search engine giant Baidu, which also make their own semiconductors, to report how their products compare against Nvidia's China chips, according to one of the people with knowledge of the matter.