The variety of firms creating AI processor chips now numbers effectively over 100, based on new analysis.
Develop a brand new Arm: UK advisory physique needs funding in native AI chips
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Ever since OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT over two years in the past, curiosity in coaching and deploying AI fashions has ballooned, with graphics processing items (GPUs) changing into the accelerator of option to drive all that effort, notably these manufactured by US chip biz Nvidia.
However these are usually not the one choices relating to AI coaching or particularly inference – the precise use of the educated fashions – with different choices out there such because the neural processing items (NPUs) embedded in some desktop and laptop computer CPUs.
Different producers need to get in on the motion, maybe with an eye fixed to the truth that Nvidia grew to become the primary publicly traded firm to move $4 trillion in market worth final month.
In response to Jon Peddie Analysis (JPR), there are not any fewer than 121 firms now speaking about producing AI processors, starting from tiny chips focusing on embedded purposes and Web of Issues (IoT-class) units, proper as much as hyperscale datacenter merchandise.
JPR’s Q3 2025 AI Processors Market Improvement Report finds that the US at the moment leads, as you may anticipate, with a minimum of 59 of these firms hailing from the land of the not-so-tariff-free. China is a way behind with 14 firms, whereas most different nations have only a handful at most.
Whereas America stays out in entrance, China’s DeepSeek and Huawei proceed to push their very own superior chips, and India has additionally introduced an indigenous GPU program, with manufacturing focused for 2029, JPR says.
Inside the US itself, California and Texas are the hotbeds of growth exercise, with California dwelling to no fewer than 42 of the AI chip corporations based mostly within the nation.
Taken collectively, all these corporations have attracted greater than $13.5 billion in startup funding, the analysis operation says, with a lot of them elevating $100 million or extra prior to now 12 months alone.
However JPR president Dr Jon Peddie cautions {that a} shake-out is more likely to see many of those fledgling AI silicon hopefuls fall by the wayside over the subsequent a number of years.
“AI processors are experiencing a Cambrian explosion, harking back to the 3D graphics growth of the late Nineteen Nineties and the XR (prolonged actuality) wave of the 2010s,” Dr Peddie says. “We anticipate fast consolidation within the coming years, with the 121 gamers we monitor at present shrinking to round 25 survivors by the tip of this decade.”
The shake-out may additionally come sooner, as many purchasers are starting to report that there’s little or no return on funding for the billions they’ve sunk into AI growth, believing (or maybe hoping) it might ship a leap in productiveness, as The Register reported just lately.
That hasn’t stopped UK advisory physique the Council for Science and Know-how (CST) advising the federal government that Britain ought to place itself as a world chief in designing AI chips over the subsequent decade. ®