AI’s Next Great Bottleneck Isn’t the Chip—It’s Everything Between the Chips
For years, the artificial-intelligence industry has behaved as though the future could be secured simply by manufacturing a more powerful chip. More transistors. More GPU cores. More high-bandwidth memory. More performance per watt. More enormous numbers printed across keynote slides while an executive in a leather jacket explains that the latest processor is approximately seventeen civilizations more advanced than the one released six months ago. I understand the obsession. Chips are tangible. They can be photographed, benchmarked and given names that sound like rejected villains from a superhero movie. They also provide investors with a comfortably simple story: Company A has the fastest chip, so Company A wins. Unfortunately, computers do not run on keynote slides. They run as systems, and those systems must continually move staggering amounts of data among processors, memory, switches, racks and data centers. A GPU can perform calculations at astonishing speed, but it cannot calcul...
