The Race For Chip Dominance | CNBC Marathon

CNBC Marathon goes to explore the biggest tech companies that are designing chips on U.S. soil.

Thirty years ago, Taiwan immigrant Jensen Huang founded Nvidia with the dream of revolutionizing PCs and gaming with 3D graphics. In 1999, after laying off the majority of workers and nearly going bankrupt, the company succeeded when it launched what it claims as the world’s first Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). Then Jensen bet the company on something entirely different: AI. Now, that bet is paying off in a big way as Nvidia’s A100 chips quickly become the coveted training engines for ChatGPT and other generative AI. But as the chip shortage eases, other chip giants like Intel are struggling. And with all it’s chips made by TSMC in Taiwan, Nvidia remains vulnerable to mounting U.S.-China trade tensions. We went to Nvidia’s Silicon Valley, California, headquarters to talk with Huang and get a behind-the scenes-look at the chips powering gaming and the AI boom.

Samsung may be known for android phones, TVs and appliances, but it’s also been the undisputed leader in memory for more than three decades. Now, as memory prices continue to fall, it’s doubling down on manufacturing chips for outside customers, with a $17 billion new chip fab in Texas and new $228 billion cluster in South Korea. CNBC got a rare look inside Samsung’s chip business to bring you the untold story of how it became the world’s second biggest advanced chipmaker, just as it makes plans to catch the industry leader TSMC.

Despite its firm footing as the world’s biggest cloud provider, Amazon Web Services got a slow start to the generative AI race. AWS released its large language model, Titan, months after Microsoft’s reported $13 billion investment in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Google’s release of Bard. But AWS is also designing its own custom AI microchips, shown to CNBC in an exclusive tour of its Austin chip lab. Now analysts say AWS may gain a long term advantage in AI by offering an alternative to Nvidia GPUs.

Apple has designed its own custom chips for iPhones since 2010, kicking off a trend followed by other non-chip giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Tesla. In November, CNBC became the first journalists to film inside an Apple chip lab, where it tests its latest M3 chips that replaced Intel processors in all new Macs. We also got a rare chance to talk with Apple’s head of silicon, Johny Srouji, and Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering, John Ternus, about geopolitical risks in Taiwan, slowdowns and what’s next in AI.

Chapters:

Produced by: Katie Tarasov

Edited by: Sydney Boyo, Evan Lee Miller, Amy Marino

Supervising Producer: Jeniece Pettitt

Additional Reporting: Jordan Novet

Animation: Andrea Schmitz, Christina Locopo, Jason Reginato, Midnight Snacks

Camera: Andrew Evers, Katie Brigham Joseph Huerta

Additional Footage: Getty Images , Apple, TSMC, AMD, Google, Intel, Nvidia, OpenAI, Qualcomm, Samsung, Amazon, Airbus, Autobus, Microsoft, ASML

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The Race For Chip Dominance | CNBC Marathon