According to foreign media reports, Amazon is developing an artificial intelligence (AI) chip that will mainly be used in Amazon Echo and other hardware devices based on Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant.
Sources familiar with the matter said the chip will greatly improve the data processing capabilities of Alexa-based hardware devices, thus allowing them to respond more quickly to user commands.
The move makes Amazon another major tech company, after Google and Apple, to develop its own artificial intelligence chips. The reason these tech companies are doing this is to personalize their own products. But for traditional chip companies like Intel and Nvidia, that doesn't bode well: because their customers are about to become competitors.
Amazon and Google's development of their own chips also reminds us of the early state of the tech market. At the time, big tech companies like IBM and Sun dabbled in all sorts of areas, including developing their own chips and software. But in the past few years, Apple has begun to develop its own chips in order to personalize its products, thereby reducing its reliance on external partners.
In fact, in the past two years, through acquisitions and recruiting talent, Amazon has been "secretly" developing chip functions. 2015, Amazon spent $350 million to buy the Israeli chip maker Annapurna Labs. at the time, Amazon did not disclose the purpose of the acquisition of the company. What is the intention of the acquisition of the company. But last year, Annapurna Labs announced that it was developing a series of chips for data storage devices, WiFi routers, smart home devices and streaming media devices.
And now Annapurna Labs is working on artificial intelligence chips for hardware devices based on the Alexa virtual assistant, people familiar with the matter said recently. Amazon declined to comment on that.
For Intel and Nvidia, Amazon's self-developed data center chip is a small threat. Currently, Intel controls 98 percent of the server main chip market, while Nvidia develops artificial intelligence chips for those servers that work with Intel's main chips.
Amazon's interest in GRAIL may signal its intention to get into AI in healthcare: its investment in GRAIL signals its belief that genomics, which has a huge need for data and processing performance, will become an important area of computing. Amazon's existing TV series and AI tools also mean that it's in a good position to enter the healthcare space, which is already contested by a number of AI startups.