AMD releases Instinct MI300 Series to rival NVIDIA’s H100

AMD CEO Lisa Su holding a MI300X chip [Courtesy of AMD]

The latest chip from United States semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD), who counts NVIDIA Corp. as a rival, is gaining traction amid an intensifying global race to develop AI technology.

AMD announced the launch of its new AI chip, the Instinct MI300 Series, at an investor relations event in San Francisco, California that took place on Wednesday local time.

The Instinct MI300 Series features the MI300X, a graphics processing unit (GPU), and the MI300A that combines a central processing unit (CPU) and a GPU to compete with NVIDIA’s H100, which currently leads the AI chip market, specifically.

AMD’s newest chip is even becoming an alternative to NVIDIA’s H100, with Meta Platforms Inc. saying on Wednesday that it will use the Instinct MI300X for AI inferencing such as AI sticker generation and image editing.

Microsoft Corp. unveiled plans to use the MI300X chip for its cloud service, Azure, and Oracle Corp. said it will use AMD chips for its cloud service.

ChatGPT developer OpenAI Inc. also said that it will use AMD chips for its open-source GPU programming language, Triton.

According to a recent report by research firm Omidyar Network, Meta and Microsoft were the largest buyers of NVIDIA’s H100 in 2023 to date. The H100 is a chip designed to train large language models (LLMs), which are the foundation of generative AI models. But the chips have been in short supply and with a price range between $25,000 and $40,000 per chip, many companies could not buy them.

AMD Chief Executive Officer Lisa Su presented the Instinct MI300X by comparing it with the H100 at the product reveal event on Wednesday and said that the MI300X offers 2.4 times the memory density and more than 1.6 times the bandwidth compared with the H100.

AMD expects the AI chip market size to reach $45 billion this year, 50 percent higher than the $30 billion that was forecast in June 2023. The company also predicts that the AI chip market will grow significantly to $400 billion by 2027.