The AI arms race is in full swing, with giants like Meta, xAI, and Amazon generously spending money, igniting another round of AI market enthusiasm in the U.S. stock market.
On Wednesday, U.S. chip stocks rose broadly, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index closing up 1.71% and the chip ETF SOXX also rising 1.71%. Chip company Marvell Technology surged 23.19%, marking its best single-day performance since May 2023; Micron Technology rose 3.37%, Broadcom increased by 1.43%, AMD was up 1.42%, and TSMC gained 0.91%.
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Behind this is the intense competition in AI hardware among tech giants. This week, Amazon announced plans to build the world's largest AI computing cluster, followed by Meta's announcement of a $10 billion AI data center, and news that Elon Musk's xAI plans to expand its supercomputer project tenfold...
<h2>The AI Arms Race Intensifies</h2>
On Wednesday, Facebook's parent company Meta announced it would invest $10 billion to establish the largest artificial intelligence data center in the company's history in northeastern Louisiana.
Meta did not disclose how many GPUs the new facility will support. Kevin Janda, Meta's director of data center strategy, stated that the data center will cover 4 million square feet (370,000 square meters) and is expected to create 500 operational jobs and 5,000 temporary construction jobs.
On the same day, Musk's AI startup xAI announced that it plans to expand its supercomputer Colossus in Memphis, Tennessee, to accommodate at least one million GPUs.
This move represents a significant expansion of Colossus, which currently has 100,000 GPUs to train xAI's chatbot Grok.
The day before, Amazon also announced a partnership with Anthropic to create the AI supercomputer UltraCluster, codenamed Rainer. Amazon stated that this computer is expected to be equipped with hundreds of thousands of Amazon's latest AI training chips, Trainium 2, and once completed, it will be five times larger than Anthropic's current most powerful model cluster, becoming the world's largest AI supercomputer.
Over the past two years, Amazon has relied on Anthropic's AI and Nvidia's hardware to drive its cloud sales growth, but its AI ambitions go beyond that. The company is developing more powerful next-generation chips in hopes of challenging Nvidia's monopoly.
On Wednesday, Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, stated at the Re:Invent conference that Amazon's new AI chip Trainium 2 offers far greater value to AI developers than Nvidia's flagship H100 chip, and the company plans to launch the next generation of more advanced 3-nanometer training chip, Trainium 3, by the end of next year
In order to reduce its dependence on NVIDIA, AI large model giant OpenAI is also getting into the chip business. In February of this year, there were reports that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman planned to raise $7 trillion to build a chip empire. However, the latest news indicates that OpenAI has chosen a more pragmatic path, first bringing in partners to create its own chip, rather than establishing a network of chip factories

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The competition among tech giants in AI hardware has intensified. This week, Amazon announced plans to build the world's largest AI computing cluster, followed closely by Meta's announcement of a $10 billion AI data center. Additionally, news has emerged that xAI, owned by Elon Musk, plans to expand its supercomputer project tenfold

- The AI arms race is intensifying, with major companies like Meta, xAI, and Amazon investing heavily, leading to a surge in U.S. stock prices for chip companies.  
- Meta plans to invest $10 billion in a new AI data center in Louisiana, while xAI aims to expand its supercomputer Colossus significantly.  
- Amazon is collaborating with Anthropic to create the UltraCluster supercomputer, which will be five times larger than its current model, as it seeks to reduce reliance on Nvidia's technology.

Tech giants are splurging, the AI arms race is heating up, and chip stocks are surging across the board