Not Microsoft, Google or ChatGPT-maker OpenAI: Eric Schmidt sees this company as ‘big AI winner’

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently held a talk session at Stanford and told students that he believes the tech company that will be a winner in the era of AI will not be his former employer, Microsoft or ChatGPT-maker OpenAI but the one on which all these rely on.
Schmidt said that big technology companies are planning for large investments into Nvidia-based AI data centres, which may cost as much as $300 billion to build.
“I’m talking to the big companies, and the big companies are telling me they need $20 billion, $50 billion, $100 billion — very very hard,” said Schmidt, adding that he’s a “close friend” to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
“If $300 billion is all going to Nvidia, you know what to do in the stock market,” Schmidt said, adding, “That’s not a stock recommendation.”
Schmidt’s indication that such a huge amount going to Nvidia – which makes the highly in-demand data centre AI chips H100 – will make it a winner. Notably, has already seen revenue increase by more than 200% for three straight quarters. And it even leapfrogged big companies in terms of valuation.
“At the moment, the gap between the frontier models — there are only three — and everyone else appears to be getting larger,” Schmidt said.
“Six months ago, I was convinced that the gap was getting smaller, so I invested lots of money in the little companies. Now I’m not so sure,” he added.

Tech giants making their own AI chips

In a bid to reduce their reliance on Nvidia, tech giants are developing their own chips. Google has developed chips called Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) to compete with Nvidia’s processors.
Microsoft announced the Azure Maia 100 AI chip last year and it is designed to run cloud-based AI workloads. Meanwhile, Amazon is also preparing Trainium chips and Facebook-parent Meta revealed plans for “Artemis,” a second-generation Al chip surpassing their initial Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) product launched last year.