Why Nvidia's ARM Acquisition May Start AI Winter

I see this as having the opposite effect, an AI boom. When I talk about AI I am talking about it in a weak sense, i.e. agents that make limited predictions, interpret speech and goals, and provide enhanced situational awareness to their users. In other words human-augmenting AI (a Centaur system).

Nvidia has recently put more marketing and effort in the commercial world into their AI lines than their graphics. Look at the DGX line of products as an example [1].

They also see the potential in an Internet of Things enabled with Intelligent Software Agents. This will require AI in the cloud, and hence Nvidia AI hardware there, but it will ultimately also require AI at the edge, on devices. Nvidia knows this and has been marketing accordingly. The Nvidia Jetson product is an example [2].

Now Arm comes in. Acquiring Arm lets Nvidia take it a step further - they can create ASICs[3] for phone manufactures that provide an AI solution they can just add to their products. It also allows them to build custom hardware for the enterprise that just plugs into the network, something like network-attached-storage but network-attached-AI instead.

[1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/dgx-2/

[2] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-sy...

[3] https://anysilicon.com/introduction-to-artificial-intelligen...