Can Nvidia be dethroned? Meet the startups vying for its crown

“HE WHOcontrolsGPUGPUAIGPUGPUGPUAIAI the s, controls the universe.” This spin on a famous line from “”, a science-fiction classic, is commonly heard these days. Access to s, and in particular those made by Nvidia, the leading supplier, is vital for any company that wants to be taken seriously in artificial intelligence (). Analysts talk of companies being “-rich” or “-poor”, depending on how many of the chips they have. Tech bosses boast of their giant stockpiles. has pushed its market value above $2trn. On May 22nd it reported that its sales for the quarter ending in April grew by 262%, year on year (see chart).s do the computational heavy lifting needed to train and operate . Yet, oddly, this is not what they were designed for. The initials stand for “graphics processing unit”, because such chips were originally designed to process video-game graphics. It turned out that, fortunately for Nvidia, they could be repurposed for workloads.