Intel has sold AI chips worth over US$1 billion last year

Although artificial intelligence is not going to match natural stupidity anytime soon, Intel estimates that AI-driven data-centric businesses will provide a market opportunity worth around US$200 billion in 2022. Even now, this field proves to be quite lucrative for the chip maker, revealed Intel's Navin Shenoy, executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group.

Yesterday, Intel's official spoke at the company's Data-Centric Innovation Summit, where he revealed that "In 2017, more than $1 billion in revenue came from customers running AI on Intel Xeon processors in the data center." Regarding the insane amount of data generated these days by the digital realm, he mentioned the following key facts:

• 90 percent of the world’s data was generated in the last two years
• for now, a "safe guess" claims that roughly 1 percent of this huge amount of data is "processed and acted upon"
• by 2025, the digital data in the world will grow by 10 times, reaching 163 zettabytes (one zettabyte equals no less than one trillion gigabytes)

To harness the power lying within those zettabytes of data, Intel is preparing the next-generation Xeon platform on 14 nm (Cascade Lake and Cooper Lake, both Xeon Scalable processors with AI capabilities, of which the first one should begin shipping before the end of 2018) and beyond (the 10 nm Ice Lake chip that will share a common platform with Cooper Lake).

All in all, the future for the AI field looks impressive, but Intel is not the only one targeting it. It only remains to see who is going to grab the largest slice of the AI pie in the years to come. If you have any thoughts you'd like to share, let us know in the comments.