Big Bets on A.I. Open a New Frontier for Chip Start-Ups, Too<br />It acquired Nervana, a 50-employee Silicon Valley start-up that had started building an A. I.<br />chip from scratch, for $400 million, according to a report from the tech news site Recode.<br />Researchers at places like Microsoft and Google, which has built its own chip just for A. I., “train” neural networks by extreme trial<br />and error, testing the algorithms across vast numbers of chips for hours and even days on end.<br />Nvidia sold $143 million in chips for the massive computer data centers run by companies<br />like Google in the year leading up to that summer — double the year before.<br />“Machine learning and A. I.<br />has reopened questions around how to build computers,” said Bill Coughran, who helped oversee the global infrastructure at Google for several years<br />and is now a partner at Sequoia, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm.<br />The first big change will most likely come in the data center, where companies like Graphcore<br />and Cerebras, which has been quiet about its plans, hope to accelerate the creation of new forms of A. I.<br />After that, a second Silicon Valley start-up, Cerebras, grabbed five Nervana engineers as it, too, designed a chip just for A. I.<br />Raising money in 2015 and early 2016 was a nightmare, said Mike Henry, chief executive at the A. I.<br />chip start-up Mythic.
