Intel has found its first cloud customer for its Gaudi 3 AI accelerator chip: IBM Cloud.
IBM and Intel announced Thursday that IBM Cloud will offer Gaudi 3 to customers early next 12 months. The chip's accelerators can be available for each hybrid and on-premises environments, and IBM plans to enable support for Gaudi 3 inside its Watsonx AI and data platform.
“Realizing the total potential of AI requires an open and collaborative ecosystem that gives customers with alternative and accessible solutions,” said Justin Hotard, general manager of Intel's data center and AI division, in a press release. “By integrating Gaudi 3 AI accelerators and Xeon CPUs into the IBM Cloud, we’re creating recent AI capabilities and meeting the demand for inexpensive, secure and modern AI computing solutions.”
Gaudi 3, unveiled in December 2023, was alleged to be Intel's answer to AI chips from rivals Nvidia and AMD. It marks the top of the Gaudi accelerator series, which Intel obtained through its $2 billion acquisition of Habana Labs in 2019.
Intel earlier this 12 months showed of Gaudi 3 reference designs that partners akin to Lenovo, Dell, HPE and Super Micro could use in servers. The designs include a brand new type of Ethernet connectivity that is meant to compete with Nvidia's InfiniBand connectivity technology. They also mix Gaudi 3 chips with Intel's Xeon 6 series of processors.
But Gaudi 3 got here at a precarious time for Intel, as the corporate was severely disadvantaged by Nvidia's dominance.
In April, Intel announced that it expected Gaudi 3 to generate $500 million in revenue in 2024 – a paltry sum in comparison with the $4.5 billion AMD expects from sales of its Instinct MI300 series GPUs and the $40 billion Nvidia expects from its data center business. Gaudi 3 offers impressively high performance for little money. First benchmarks showBut acquiring customers who have already got a great business relationship with Nvidia is a challenge.
In July, Intel CTO Greg Lavender optimistically said the corporate could take second place within the AI chip market behind Nvidia. A month later, after Intel reported a $1.6 billion loss within the second quarter, the corporate announced it might cut 15,000 jobs and drastically reduce costs to avoid wasting $10 billion by 2025.
To make matters worse for Intel, Nvidia intends to ramp up production of its next-generation AI chip, Blackwell, within the fourth quarter after a temporary production delay. Blackwell can be as much as 4 times more powerful than the H100, the chip to which Gaudi 3 is comparable.
Intel has made some extent to not make any comparisons with Blackwell, arguing that this may not be possible until the Blackwell chips were publicly available.
