Computex 2023 – For Qualcomm, the cloud will not be able to provide enough computing power for AI


Faced with the upheavals caused by the take-off of generative AI, electronic component manufacturers are getting into battle order. While the race is accelerating to develop chips capable of supporting new uses around AI, players in the sector are however aware that they do not have unlimited resources to meet ever-increasing demand since the euphoria caused by the arrival of ChatGPT last year.

If the cloud has been perceived in recent years as the miracle solution to overcome the limits of physical storage devices, it will not be sufficient to meet the strong market demand, according to the staff of Qualcomm. “As growth in the number of connected devices and data traffic continues to accelerate and data center costs rise, it simply won’t be possible to send everything to the cloud”said Alex Katouzian, senior vice president of Qualcomm, at the Computex technology fair in Taiwan. “People also won’t want to do it when personal information is involved”he added.

The world on one “tipping point of a new computing era”

To date, Qualcomm has shipped two billion AI-enabled products. A figure that will show a strong increase over the next few years. In the future, smartphones and computers will have to be able to support AI-based tasks, such as photo processing or malware detection. But faced with the proliferation of uses in AI, which require huge amounts of data, cloud infrastructure could end up showing its limits, despite the acceleration of construction sites to bring data centers out of the ground. This therefore raises questions about the ability of devices to perform AI-based tasks locally.

Still, the rise of uses in AI is bringing the technological sphere into a new dimension. Also present at Computex, Jensen Huang, the boss of Nvidia, felt that the world was on a “tipping point of a new computing era”. The American company will take advantage of the Taiwanese show to present a new supercomputer dedicated to AI. Called DGX GH200, it will first be used by Google Cloud, Meta and Microsoft. The three American giants are among the technology companies that intend to benefit greatly from the AI ​​revolution.



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