Broadcom is launching a powerful new networking chip that will help companies build the massive supercomputers needed for artificial intelligence. The new chip, called the Thor Ultra, is a direct challenge to Nvidia’s dominance in the AI hardware market.
The Thor Ultra is designed to be the critical link that connects hundreds of thousands of individual AI chips, allowing them to work as one giant brain. This is essential for building and running the massive AI models that power applications like ChatGPT.
This is a huge opportunity for Broadcom. The company’s CEO, Hock Tan, has said that the market for its various AI chips could be worth between $60 billion and $90 billion by 2027. The company is already seeing massive growth, reporting over $12 billion in AI revenue last year and announcing a new, unnamed $10 billion customer in September.
The launch of the Thor Ultra comes just a day after Broadcom announced a major deal with OpenAI to build custom AI chips for the ChatGPT maker. That deal, along with this new networking chip, shows that Broadcom is aggressively pushing into the AI space and is not afraid to take on the industry giant, Nvidia.
