Jane Lanhee Lee and Steven Scheer

JERUSALEM/SAN FRANCISCO – (Reuters). Intel Corp On Tuesday, (NASDAQ) launched a Gaudi2 chip that focuses on artificial intelligence computing. This is a major push by the chip maker to enter the AI chip market currently dominated Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ) Corp.

Gaudi2 by Habana Labs is an Israeli AI chip startup Intel purchased in the late 2020s for approximately $2 billion. AI chip startup have received huge investment in recent years, as AI computing has been one of the fastest-growing areas of data center technology.

Prying market share away from Nvidia has been a challenge as many AI researchers and companies have been accustomed to using Nvidia’s software platform CUDA. Intel stated to Reuters that it is focusing its efforts on software development, in addition new chips for AI computing.

“CUDA is not a moat that Nvidia can really stand on for long,” said chief business officer at Habana Labs Eitan Medina, adding that Intel’s software platform is open standard, free to download and use from GitHub, the software development site. “Now the question is who can do the work efficiently?”

Medina said the Gaudi2 was twice as fast as Habana’s previous AI chip and manufactured at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s 7-nanometer transistor technology from 16-nanometers previously. The faster and stronger the chip, generally speaking, is the transistor’s size.

Greco, an Intel chip for inferencing work was also introduced. It takes an AI algorithm to take and makes a prediction about or identify an object.

Sandra Rivera is the head of Intel’s AI and data centers. She said that the market for AI chips will grow by 25% per year over the next five-years to around $50 billion. “We intend to invest and innovate to lead this market,” she said, adding that increasingly the investments will be in software, both for expanding Intel’s team and buying other companies.