The AI Industry’s Swim Lanes Get Even Blurrier

If your artificial intelligence firm isn’t also a chipmaker and cloud provider, are you even an AI company?

That’s what it’s starting to feel like, as more companies try to fill out more parts of the AI “stack” by providing the models, hardware and computational resources businesses need to build or use AI-powered apps. 

In just the last 24 hours, my colleague Anissa published this great piece on how Nvidia is strong-arming cloud startups like CoreWeave and Nebius to offer their servers through the chipmaker’s new cloud “marketplace.”

Mistral, the French AI model developer, announced its own cloud service for AI customers called Mistral Compute. And chipmaker AMD, which has struggled to make gains against Nvidia, is “acquihiring” some of the employees of Lamini, a startup that helps developers run and tweak open-source models, Lamini cofounder and CEO Sharon Zhou posted. That could foreshadow a deeper move by AMD to sell software or services, not just chips.