AI hardware comprises silicon chips designed to perform highly parallel operations required by AI in areas such as compute, memory, storage, and networking. While software innovation has been the key driver for AI growth for the longest time, hardware will be the differentiator in AI going forward. As per current market trends, it is clear that semiconductor companies are well positioned to capture more value from the AI technology stack. As per McKinsey estimates, by 2025 AI-related semiconductors could account for almost 20% of all demand, which would translate into about $67 billion in revenue. While the hardware market has long been dominated by large global corporations, the past decade has seen the startup ecosystem catch up rapidly. Following are some of the leading semiconductor players of the world in the startup space. 

• Graphcore: Graphcore is a British semiconductor company that develops accelerators for AI and machine learning for use in fields as diverse as medicine, robotics or autonomous mobility. It aims to make its Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) technology the worldwide standard for machine intelligence compute. The company was founded in 2012 by Nigel Toon and Simon Knowles.
• Cambricon Technologies: Cambricon builds core processor chips for intelligent cloud servers, intelligent terminals and intelligent robots. Founded by brothers Chen Yunji and Chen Tianshi, it is one of China’s most valuable AI chip start-ups. Its chips have been used to power nearly 100 million smartphones and servers.
• SambaNova Systems: SambaNova provides systems that run AI and data-intensive apps from the datacenter to the edge. Leveraging a combination of algorithmic optimizations and custom board-based hardware, SambaNova claims it’s able to dramatically improve the performance and capability of most AI-imbued apps. It was founded in 2017 by Rodrigo Liang, Kunle Olukotun and Chris Ré.
• Movidius: Movidius designs specialised low-power processor chips, Vision Processor Units (VPU) for computer vision. Founded in 2005, the company was acquired by Intel in 2016 and is headquartered in California.
• Hailo: Hailo offers AI processor for edge devices, which it claims is a breakthrough specialised deep learning microprocessor to deliver data center performance to edge devices. Founded in 2017, the company is headquartered in Israel.

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