Nvidia Investors May Not See This Competition Brewing

Among the growing number of options for accelerators are a new breed of potential competitors-their own customers

News provided by

Sep 15, 2021, 10:08 ET

AUSTIN, Texas, Sept. 15, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Liftr Insights, a pioneer in market intelligence about hyperscale cloud infrastructure, has identified trends in their data indicating increased deployment of in-house designed chips in addition to Nvidia chips.

"It's rare to have objective data as we do, based on publicly available information," says Tab Schadt, CEO of Liftr Insights. "We are seeing interesting trends in our data."

Among those trends are new competitors to Nvidia–including its own customers. While AWS or Azure would not stop buying from Nvidia, Liftr data shows increased use of in-house designed components. These investments reduce costs while increasing their control of the specifications. Even as the cloud providers buy and consume more Nvidia components, Liftr data reveals that demand for accelerators is growing at a faster rate.

Liftr Insights data shows dramatically increased use of in-house designed accelerators for artificial intelligence applications. Amazon Web Services, for example, has increased the number of configurations that utilize its AWS Inferentia accelerator by more than 170% since August 2020. During this same period, Nvidia's most direct competitor, AMD, has expanded its number of configurations in the public cloud by over150%.

The use of accelerator technologies, whether GPU, inference processor, or FPGA, is growing at a rapid clip. The accelerated compute landscape is shifting. The mix of vendors providing these technologies is expanding, all while the economics of in-house designed silicon are making it an attractive option for public cloud providers to pursue.

"Our customers know that the most effective way to monitor this market," says Schadt, "is through timely quantitative analysis of the offerings available from the top public cloud providers."

About Liftr Insights
Liftr Insights generates market intelligence to portfolio managers and research analysts as well as supply chain customers. Among the data obtained are configurations, components, deployment geo and pricing for:

Server processors: Intel Xeon, AMD EPYC, and AWS's Arm-based Graviton brands
Datacenter compute accelerators: GPUs, FPGAs, TPUs and AI chips from NVIDIA, Xilinx, Intel, AMD, AWS and Google

Among the companies tracked are Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, and Google Cloud, as well as semiconductor vendors AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and Xilinx. Liftr Insights subject matter experts translate company-specific service provider data into actionable alternative data. Technology investors can easily ingest this timely, standardized and operationally-compliant information into their predictive financial models.

Liftr Insights provides a high-level map overlay of service growth and availability for the four tracked cloud service providers at https://bit.ly/LiftrCloudRegionsMap.

Liftr and the Liftr logo are registered service marks of Liftr Insights. The following are trademarks and/or service marks of Liftr Insights: Liftr Insights, Liftr Cloud Components Tracker, and Liftr Cloud Regions Map.

The following are registered intellectual property marks, trademarks or service marks of their respective companies:
Amazon Web Services
Microsoft Azure
Alibaba Cloud
Google Cloud
Intel Corporation
NVIDIA
AMD
ARM
Xilinx