Google vs. NVIDIA: Losing the AI Innovation Competition | Deepgram
On June 11th, 2024, NVIDIA became the most valuable publicly traded company in the world. Though its shares have slipped down afterwards, without a doubt, NVIDIA has been one of the fastest growing companies in the entire world, being accelerated by the boom of AI research and development with the chipmaker being the foundation of nearly all AI-related computers.
NVIDIA’s market cap now sits at a little over $3 trillion dollars, nearly double what it started with in the beginning of 2024, less than half a year ago. As the competition in AI heats up, big tech companies, not just chipmaker competitors such as Intel or AMD, but Microsoft, Google, and Meta, are all attempting to catch the “AI hype”.
Google Falling Behind in the AI Race
Notably, compared to other competitors along with its track record, Google seems to be falling behind, at least in terms of valuation. Of course, a company’s value doesn’t speak the entire story and unlike NVIDIA, Google has a much broader market that isn’t solely focused on AI.
Although Google, a company with an amazing track record for revolutionizing both AI research and hardware, may be falling behind amidst the rise of AI. The fact that LLM developments from recent years by Google trails behind nearly all other popular models from large tech companies doesn’t help the case either.
Performance Comparison
Performance comparison between Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), Llama (Meta), and GPT-4o (OpenAI/Microsoft)
However, the AI race is not just about market valuation and benchmarks; they alone cannot tell the entire story. Google, with its expansive reach and diverse portfolio, has invested heavily in AI research and development through its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) technology and projects led by Google Brain and DeepMind. Despite these efforts, questions remain about whether Google can keep pace with NVIDIA’s rapid advancements in AI hardware, particularly its GPUs that are setting new benchmarks in AI compute power.
Technological Advancements and Competitive Dynamics
While Google and NVIDIA are competitors, NVIDIA almost single-handedly supports the entire AI infrastructure, supplying GPUs to nearly every major tech company, including Google. Within this competition, there’s also a layer of partnership between the two giants.
NVIDIA’s strategic moves, including developing custom AI chips for major tech giants and launching powerful GPUs like the H100, have positioned it at the forefront of AI innovation.
Meanwhile, Google’s TPU technology, though impressive, has primarily powered its services and cloud infrastructure. The latest version, TPU v5p, has shown significant performance and efficiency improvements but faces stiff competition from NVIDIA’s H100 GPUs.
NVIDIA's Advancements in AI Landscape
Nvidia’s rise in the AI landscape is fueled by its rapid advancements in GPU architecture, particularly with the Hopper architecture and the powerful H100 GPU. The H100 offers up to four times the performance of its predecessor, the A100, addressing the computational demands of AI training and inference with enhanced power, memory bandwidth, and efficiency.
