- However, the ongoing trade dispute between China and the US has negative implications for the global progress of AI semis technology, GlobalData says
Rapid technological progress and capability is set to drive global artificial intelligence (AI) chips revenue from $12 billion in 2021 to reach $130 billion by 2030, at a compound annual growth rate of 30 per cent.
“This rapid expansion will be driven by chips specifically optimised for AI with their share of the combined micro-component and digital logic semiconductor market set to increase from less than 10 per cent in 2021 to at least 40 per cent by 2030,” Josep Bori, Research Director at GlobalData Thematics Intelligence, said.
Moreover, he said that deep learning neural networks continue to expand their capabilities, now including face recognition, medical diagnosis, and self-driving cars.
“This has been led by an improvement in the mathematical models used and the exponential growth in the model sizes and training data sets.”
Innovative computing architectures
GlobalData expects the number of real-life use cases of OpenAI’s GPT-3 model to continue to grow, particularly in the self-driving cars and robotics arenas, which will further show the limits of traditional processing semiconductors and drive demand for AI chips.
The popular OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, which is already capable of writing original prose with fluency equivalent to that of a human, has 175 billion parameters and takes months to train.
Currently, Bori said that most of the progress in the development of AI chips is coming from redesigning classic microprocessor architectures to optimise instruction sets for linear algebra, use compact data types, and enable massive parallelism and memory on chip.
“We should not forget the disruptive potential of radically innovative computing architectures such as neuromorphic chips as well as quantum computing. The microcomponent and digital logic market is growing 7 per cent annually however the AI component of this market is achieving over 40 per cent growth,” he said.
However, he said that the ongoing trade dispute between China and the US has negative implications for the global progress of AI semis technology.
“We believe China will play a leading role in AI, due to its leadership in AI software and IoT technology, and its progress in low end chips manufacturing. However, unless China solves its access to extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography technology, currently indirectly prevented by US sanctions, it will likely struggle in AI in the datacentre, and most likely autonomous vehicles.”