Intel, Google, Arm, Qualcomm, Samsung, and other tech companies have formed an alliance called the UXL Foundation, which is trying to develop an open-source software suite that will free AI developers from their long-standing dependence on NVIDIA chips. In other words, the UXL Alliance wants to find the key to allowing developers' programs to run on any machine, regardless of the chip used.

NVIDIA's Achilles heel?

According to AFP, NVIDIA has become the world's most valuable chipmaker with a total market capitalization of up to 2,200 billion USD thanks to providing AI chips. These are the chips that create the era of generative AI developers, a form of artificial intelligence that focuses on creating new content and data based on existing data.

The US corporation's chips are currently "sought after" all over the world, whether by startups or long-standing tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, or OpenAI, the father of ChatGPT. Despite the US embargo, many Chinese companies are still looking to buy NVIDIA chips.

In addition to hardware, part of NVIDIA's formidable power comes from a computer code called CUDA that has been researched and developed for nearly 20 years. This makes NVIDIA almost unbeatable. More than 4 million developers worldwide rely on NVIDIA's CUDA software platform to build AI and other applications.

Now, a coalition of tech companies including Qualcomm, Google, and Intel is planning to loosen NVIDIA’s grip on the market. They’re part of a growing group of financiers and companies looking to break free of NVIDIA’s dominance in AI. The goal is to focus on attacking the chip giant’s secret weapon: the CUDA software that forces developers to use NVIDIA chips.

"We've shown developers how they can move away from the NVIDIA platform," Reuters quoted Vinesh Sukumar, Qualcomm's director of AI and machine learning, as saying yesterday.

New Weapon

Starting with technology developed by Intel called OneAPI when it was founded in September 2023, the UXL alliance plans to build a set of software and computing tools that can eventually power a variety of AI chips. According to Reuters, the open-source project aims to allow companies' computer code to run on any machine, regardless of the type of chip or computer hardware they are powered by.

“Within machine learning, we want to create an open-source ecosystem, and drive productivity and enable hardware choice,” said Bill Magro, director and chief engineer of computer performance, Reuters reported. Google is a founding member of UXL and helped define the project’s technical direction.

The UXL technical steering committee is preparing to outline specific technical specifications in the first half of this year, and the alliance’s engineering team plans to finalize the technical details to reach a state of completion by the end of 2024. In addition to the initial companies, UXL will continue to recruit cloud computing giants like Amazon, Azure, and other chipmakers.

Now that Intel’s OneAPI is in use, the next step is to create a standard computing programming model designed for AI. Beyond its goal of competing with NVIDIA, UXL also wants to support the corporation in the long term with both hardware and computer code.