Tech giants deepen alliances to accelerate global AI expansion

By Tolga Yanik and Emir Yildirim

ISTANBUL (AA) - Tech giants providing hardware, infrastructure, and applications for artificial intelligence (AI) are forging major partnerships as the industry rapidly expands.

Chips -- especially graphics processing units (GPUs) -- remain the backbone of AI systems, and US chipmaker Nvidia controls more than 80% of the global AI chip market.

On the infrastructure side, Amazon Web Services (AWS) dominates cloud computing with a 29% market share, followed by Microsoft Azure at 20%, Google Cloud at 13%, and China’s Alibaba Cloud at 4%.

As momentum builds, investments and collaborations are accelerating. ChatGPT developer OpenAI signed a $38 billion deal with AWS earlier this month to secure advanced computing capacity for the next seven years. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the partnership will help expand access to advanced AI tools.

Under the agreement, AWS will supply the cloud infrastructure, while Nvidia chips will power the hardware.

OpenAI has also struck additional deals, including an agreement with US chipmaker AMD for a six-gigawatt computing infrastructure and a separate partnership with Nvidia in September to build and deploy at least 10 gigawatts of AI data centers -- each gigawatt requiring up to $100 billion in investment.

Microsoft, meanwhile, is bolstering its own AI capabilities. It recently signed a $9.7 billion deal with data center operator IREN to boost processing capacity and last month secured a 27% stake in OpenAI, valuing the company at $135 billion.