Google is the only customer with silicon at scale
Jensen Huang, President and CEO of Nvidia, speaks during the company's event at the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas January 6, 2019.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has reason to be concerned about other chip makers, such as AMD.
But he is not worried about Nvidia's own big customers becoming competitors.
Amazon, Facebook, Google and Tesla are among the companies that buy Nvidia's graphics card and have started chip development projects.
"There really is someone I know who has silicon that is really in production," Huang told CNBC in an interview Thursday.
This company would be Google, he said.
"But our conversation with big customers is intensifying," Huang said. "We're talking to several big customers."
Nvidia was one of the main advantages of the recent wave of interest in artificial intelligence. The company's stock multiplied more than ten times in less than three years as large companies rushed to buy pieces that could smarten up their own applications, offer AI services to other companies ̵[ads1]1; or both. Inventory issues and a sudden fall in cryptocurrency mining demand halted the meteoric rise, but Nvidia continues to talk about the impact and market potential of AI, although gaming is still its biggest source of revenue.
Google first announced entrance to the data center's AI chip-producing world in 2016. When new versions came out, the web company pointed to performance benefits over graphics cards that were available at that time. However, Google has not started selling data center chips to train AI models to other companies. (Google has begun offering various products that use their Edge tensor processor chips, but these chips are not as powerful as the TPU chips for training AI models in Google's cloud.)
Similarly, Amazon uses its AI chips only in their own data centers to provide services for third-party developers.
Traditional chip manufacturers pose a greater threat.
"Today, Nvidia dominates the data center market and probably has 90% + share," Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research told CNBC in an email. "However, AMD has won some major commitments and will increase its share. I think it is reasonable to predict a split of 20/80 by the end of 2020."
Earlier Thursday, Nvidia shares rose after the company reported quarterly results that exceeded expectations. But revenue in the data center business fell 14% from the previous year.
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