Over the past couple of years, Nvidia, by far the biggest AI chipmaker, has ramped up its investments in startups that propel it deeper into the AI space. According to S&P Global and Crunchbase, the funding and investment database, Nvidia’s startup investments jumped 280% year-over-year from 2022 to 2023, with the corporate and its VC arm, Nvidia Ventures, participating in ~46 deals last 12 months.
It’s not the just one. Nvidia’s chief rivals within the AI chip space — AMD, Arm and Intel — have been investing aggressively in startups, too, trying to make up ground in markets inclusive of the especially frothy generative AI segment.
We at TechCrunch were curious to see how the investments stacked up between the highest AI chipmakers — Nvidia, AMD, Arm and Intel. So we pored over Crunchbase data, with an eye fixed toward recent activity from each chipmaker and their VC divisions.
Intel
Of Nvidia’s competitors, Intel far and away has the largest startup investment operation due to Intel Capital, its long-running VC. In 2023, Intel Capital deployed over $350 million across its investments, including OpenAI rival AI21 Labs, threat-hunting platform Twelve Labs, app delivery network Fly.io and workplace safety outfit TuMeke.
Crunchbase data isn’t exhaustive. But it surely shows that Intel Capital participated in 32 startup deals in 2023, down from 47 in 2022. Intel also directly invested in 4 startups last 12 months (GenAI vendor Aleph Alpha and Hugging Face amongst them) and one (Vanguard Semiconductor) in 2022, per Crunchbase — bringing its grand total deal count to 36 in 2023 and 48 in 2022.
Curiously, AI startups — despite their strategic importance to the chip industry as of late — make up a comparatively small portion of Intel’s enterprise portfolio. In keeping with Crunchbase, Intel’s holdings in software, IT and enterprise SaaS corporations far outnumber its AI startup holdings by deal volume.
That might change as Intel seeks to deliver latest software services, including GenAI-powered products, that make its hardware more attractive for a variety of AI applications. Just in January, Intel spun out an organization, Articul8 AI, to construct GenAI solutions running on Intel chips for enterprises within the aerospace, financial services, telecommunications and semiconductor industries.
Arm
Arm won’t be a very energetic startup investor in comparison with Intel. But the corporate, which makes most of its money licensing chipsets it designs to customers, has several direct investment deals in addition to deals through Deeptech Labs, a VC fund and accelerator that Arm co-launched with the University of Cambridge, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Martlet Capital.
Last 12 months, Arm made 4 direct investments in startups — microprocessor enterprise SiPearl, eSIM security company Kigen and Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi Foundation — and 6 investments through Deeptech Labs. Beneficiaries of the Deeptech Labs money included Nu Quantum, a quantum networking startup; RoboK, which is constructing 3D sensing tech; and Perceptual Robotics, a provider of automated wind turbine inspection tech.
Altogether, then, Arm poured money into 10 startups in 2023. That’s a big uptick from 2022, when Arm invested in only 4 corporations — a direct investment within the open source hardware startup Arduino and three investments through Deeptech Labs (Waku Robotics, Xapien and SonicEdge).
One presumes Arm’s future investments will rope in AI in a more obvious way, provided that the corporate’s betting on sales of each its data center and consumer AI chips to steeply increase this 12 months.
AMD
Like Intel and Arm, AMD invests in startups each directly and thru a VC org, AMD Ventures. But for AMD, the deals come few and much between.
Last 12 months, AMD Ventures made a single investment, participating within the Series A for Ethernovia, a startup constructing a family of ethernet chips and software. The 12 months before, AMD Ventures invested in Radian Arc, an infrastructure-as-a-service platform for cloud gaming and AI — and no other corporations.
AMD’s direct deals outnumbered its corporate VC deals, unusually — at the least in 2023. That 12 months, AMD invested in Essential AI, which looks to pioneer AI-powered software automation tech; Moreh, an organization creating tools to optimize AI models; and Hugging Face (alongside Intel and Nvidia).
Factoring in direct investments, AMD’s deal total in 2023 got here to 4 — on the conservative side in comparison with rivals. But 2024 may look a bit different. Contacted for comment, AMD had this to share from Mathew Hein, the corporate’s chief strategy officer of corporate development:
AMD Ventures has ramped up its investment activity previously 12 months and is trying to speed up further in 2024, targeting reaching a double-digit investment level. We invest across stages, supporting promising early startups poised to turn out to be market leaders, in addition to mature later stage corporations. Most of our latest investments in 2024 shall be targeting the AI ecosystem, including AI platforms, generative model corporations and AI infrastructure offerings.
2024 shall be a pivotal 12 months for AMD in other respects. The corporate’s ramping up production of its MI300 AI chip, which is designed to handle AI workloads in data centers, and launching Ryzen 8040, its mobile AI-accelerated processors sure for laptops.
By the numbers
So it’s true: Nvidia isn’t the one chipmaker investing in early ventures. But it surely does look like outgunning the competition. In the primary three quarters of 2023 alone, Nvidia funneled nearly a billion dollars to “non-affiliated” firms, per the sooner S&P Global report — a figure even Intel Capital struggled to match.
Success within the AI chipmaking space needn’t entail fostering a sturdy startup ecosystem. But it surely’s clear that Nvidia, one in all the world’s Most worthy corporations with control of about 95% of the marketplace for AI chips, is playing for keeps — attempting to shore up dominance by spreading its financial influence far and wide.
I’d say its rivals have their work cut out for them.
