Here's How Intel Can Still Be an AI Winner

Chip giant Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) has tried and failed to break into the lucrative AI accelerator market that's dominated by Nvidia. The company's Gaudi family of AI accelerators had potential, and Intel priced them aggressively, but sales were snarled by an immature software ecosystem. Intel missed its own AI chip sales estimates for 2024, and it recently shifted gears. Falcon Shores, originally a follow-up to Gaudi 3, is cancelled as a commercial product, and Intel is now focusing on rack-scale AI solutions that likely won't be ready until 2026.While Intel is effectively a non-factor in the AI accelerator market, the company's CPU business could pick up some of the slack. As the AI industry matures and workloads shift from training AI models to running those models, Intel's Xeon server CPUs are a potent weapon in the AI wars.The recent revelation that Chinese start-up DeepSeek managed to train an AI model that compares favorably with the best models from U.S. companies while costing far less to train and run could ultimately work in Intel's favor. While training advanced AI models requires powerful accelerators like those from Nvidia, that's not necessarily the case for inference, or actually running those models. Smaller, less capable AI models can already be run effectively on CPUs, particularly CPUs that have some AI acceleration capabilities built in.Continue readingWeiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei MotleyFool Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei MotleyFool