In recent years, Nvidia, by far the largest AI chip maker, has ramped up its investment in startups that push the company deeper into the AI space. Nvidia's startup investments will increase 280% year over year from 2022 to 2023, and the company and its VC arm, Nvidia Ventures, made about 46 deals last year, according to S&P Global and funding and investment database Crunchbase. participated in.
That's not all. His Nvidia's main rivals in the AI chip space, AMD, Arm, and Intel, are also actively investing in startups, looking to establish themselves in the market, including in particular the frothy generative AI segment.
At TechCrunch, we were curious to see how investments stack up among top AI chipmakers Nvidia, AMD, Arm, and Intel. So we combed through Crunchbase's data, looking at recent activity from each chipmaker and its VC arm.
intel
Among Nvidia's competitors, Intel has the largest startup investment business thanks to Intel Capital, a long-running VC firm. In 2023, Intel Capital will deploy more than $350 million of his investments across its investments, including OpenAI rival AI21 Labs, threat hunting platform Twelve Labs, app distribution network Fly.io, and workplace safety organization TuMeke. Did.
Crunchbase data is not exhaustive. However, Intel Capital shows that in 2022 he participated in 32 startup deals, down from 47 in 2023. Intel also said that last year he invested directly in four startups (GenAI vendors Aleph Alpha and Hugging Face among them) and in 2022 he invested directly in one company (Vanguard Semiconductor). Crunchbase — The total number of transactions will be 36 in 2023 and 48 in 2022.
Oddly enough, AI startups make up a relatively small part of Intel's venture portfolio these days, despite their strategic importance to the chip industry. According to Crunchbase, Intel's holdings in software, IT, and enterprise SaaS companies far exceed its holdings in AI startups by transaction value.
This could change as Intel looks to offer new software products and services, such as GenAI-powered products, that make its hardware more attractive for a variety of AI applications. Just in January, Intel spun out Articul8 AI, a company that builds his GenAI solutions running on Intel's chips for companies in the aerospace, financial services, telecommunications, and semiconductor industries.
arm
Arm may not be a particularly active startup investor compared to Intel. However, the company makes most of its revenue from licensing its self-designed chipsets to customers, and Arm is a partner of the University of Cambridge, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Martlet Capital.
Last year, Arm made four direct investments in startups (microprocessor venture SiPearl, eSIM security company Kigen, Raspberry Pi, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation). It also made six investments through Deeptech Labs. Beneficiaries of Deeptech Labs' cash also include quantum networking startup Nu Quantum. RoboK is building his 3D sensing technology. Perceptual Robotics provides automatic inspection technology for wind turbines.
This means Arm will have poured money into a total of 10 startups in 2023. This is a significant increase from 2022, when Arm invested in just four companies. This includes direct investment in open source hardware startup Arduino and three companies (Waku Robotics, Xapien, Sonic Edge) through Deeptech Labs.
Given that Arm is betting that sales of both data center and consumer AI chips will increase significantly this year, we can assume that Arm's future investments will be more explicitly tied to AI.
AMD
Like Intel and Arm, AMD invests in startups both directly and through its VC organization, AMD Ventures. But for AMD, contracts are few and far between.
Last year, AMD Ventures made one investment, participating in the Series A of Ethernovia, a startup building a family of Ethernet chips and software. The previous year, AMD Ventures invested in Radian Arc, an infrastructure-as-a-service platform for cloud gaming and AI, but did not invest in other companies.
At least in 2023, it was unusual for AMD to have more direct deals than deals with corporate VCs. That year, AMD invested in Essential AI, a pioneer in AI-powered software automation technology. Moreh is a company that develops tools to optimize AI models. and Hugging Face (along with Intel and Nvidia).
Taking direct investments into account, AMD's total deal volume in 2023 was four, a modest number compared to its competitors. But 2024 may look a little different. When asked for comment from AMD, Mathew Hein, the company's chief strategy officer for corporate development, provided the following comment:
AMD Ventures has ramped up its investment activity over the past year and aims to further accelerate and reach double-digit investment levels in 2024. We invest across stages, supporting promising early-stage startups that are poised to become market leaders, as well as mature, late-stage companies. Most new investments in 2024 will be in the AI ecosystem, including AI platforms, generative model companies, and AI infrastructure products.
2024 will be a pivotal year for AMD in other ways as well. The company will ramp up production of its MI300 AI chip, designed to handle AI workloads in data centers, and launch the Ryzen 8040, a mobile AI fast processor for laptops.
In terms of numbers
that's the truth. Nvidia isn't the only chipmaker investing in early-stage ventures.But it is do Looks like it's outperforming its competitors. In the first three quarters of 2023 alone, Nvidia funneled nearly $1 billion into “unaffiliated” companies, according to a previous S&P Global report. Even Intel Capital had a hard time matching this number.
Success in the AI chip manufacturing space does not necessarily require fostering a robust startup ecosystem. But as his Nvidia, one of the world's most valuable companies that controls about 95% of the AI chip market, seeks to strengthen its dominance by spreading its financial influence far and wide, the It is clear that it continues.
I think our competitors are doing the job they deserve.