Intel’s Gaudi AI chips are far behind Nvidia and AMD, won’t even hit $500M goal

Nvidia made a fortune on the AI boom. AMD’s rival AI chip became the fastest ramping product in its history, already pulling in $1 billion per quarter and inspiring AMD to remake itself as an AI company too. But Intel, which suggested it would pull in $1 billion, even $2 billion on the back of AI in 2024, now says it won’t even meet its more modest $500 million goal for its Gaudi AI accelerator this year.

“We will not achieve our target of $500 million in revenue for Gaudi in 2024,” CEO Pat Gelsinger just said on the company’s Q3 2024 earnings call today.

Though Intel just launched its recent Gaudi 3 accelerator this past quarter, said Gelsinger, “the overall uptake of Gaudi has been slower than we anticipated as adoption rates were impacted by the product transition from Gaudi 2 to Gaudi 3 and software ease of use.”

Despite the missed goal, Gelsinger says “we remain encouraged by the market available to us. There is clear need for solutions with superior [total cost of ownership] based on open standards, and we are continuing to enhance the Gaudi value proposition.”

Later on the call, Gelsinger seemingly had some sour grapes to share, pointing out how so far, the industry’s huge spend on AI chips has been focused on training AI models in the cloud. “Training is creating the weather model, not using it,” he says, suggesting once again that putting AI into all the chips, not just ones in the cloud, might be more important in the long run.

Intel reported $13.3 billion in revenue in quarterly earnings today, down 6 percent year over year but up compared to last quarter — and losses of a whopping $16.6 billion. But those losses were based on $18.5 billion of impairments and restructuring charges, the cost of Intel’s decision to rework itself for more profitability in the future.

Last quarter it announced a $10 billion cost reduction plan and over 15,000 layoffs, and it’s now detailing some of the structural shifts inside the company too — including moving its edge computing business into the Client Computing Group that generally handles its desktop and laptop chips, and integrating its software teams into the company’s core business units.

Gelsinger says Intel will “focus on fewer projects, with the top priority to be to maximize the value of our x86 franchise across the client, edge, and data center markets.”