Nvidia made a splash in 2023, given the investor excitement around artificial intelligence. Its stock has already surged more than 200% higher this year. But it’s not the only one worthy of mention — other companies also look set to benefit from the AI supply chain. Daniel Newman, CEO of Futurum Research, said he would “skip past Nvidia because … a lot of people know that one.” Instead, he named other top choices he’s optimistic about for the next year. They are Advanced Micro Devices , Microsoft , and Amazon Web Services, he told CNBC’s ” Street Signs Asia ” on Friday. Newman noted that AMD had a “major landmark moment” this week. The company launched artificial intelligence chips that will compete against Nvidia to power AI applications. Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft said at an AMD investor event Wednesday that they will use AMD’s newest AI chip as an alternative to Nvidia. AMD shares spiked nearly 10% on Thursday. Newman said Microsoft has “just too much diversity to not consider as a really important partner” although its long term OpenAI strategy is “going to matter.” In November, Microsoft announced an AI chip, the Maia 100, that could compete with Nvidia’s highly sought after AI graphics processing units. Microsoft is testing how Maia 100 stands up to the needs of its Bing search engine’s AI chatbot (now called Copilot instead of Bing Chat), and GPT-3.5 Turbo, a large language model from OpenAI. As for AWS, Newman likes its “open model approach.” “They are going to be amazing in the enterprise,” he said. Amazon has been working on two types of microchips for training and accelerating generative AI. These custom chips, Inferentia and Trainium, offer AWS customers an alternative to training their large language models on Nvidia GPUs. — CNBC’s Kif Leswing and Jordan Novet contributed to this report.
