By Max A. Cherney (Reuters) -Intel said on Tuesday its data center graphics processing unit, code-named Crescent Island, was scheduled for customer sampling in the second half of 2026, signaling a renewed push to secure a spot in the fast-growing AI chip race. This marks the chipmaker's second attempt to break into the AI accelerator arena, after its earlier Gaudi chips failed to gain traction against market leaders Nvidia and AMD. Intel's GPU roadmap trails behind competitors, highlighting the significant challenges it faces to establish itself as a serious contender in AI computing. Since the generative AI boom with the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT in November 2022, startups and large cloud operators have rushed to grab GPUs that help run AI workloads on data center servers. The demand explosion has led to supply crunch and sky-high prices for AI-focused chips. Intel has said it would launch AI data chips on an annual basis, signaling a shift from irregular launch gaps to more predictable yearly updates. "Instead of trying to build for every workload out there, our focus is increasingly going to be on inference," said Chief Technology Officer Sachin Katti, referring to the phase of AI computation where models generate answers rather than train on data. The company argues that an open and modular approach in which customers can mix and match chips from different vendors is essential to scale AI systems efficiently, even as it struggles to catch up with Nvidia's dominance in AI computing. Nvidia said last month it would invest $5 billion in Intel, taking a roughly 4% stake and becoming one of its largest shareholders as part of a partnership to co-develop future PC and data center chips. (Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru and Max Cherney in San Francisco; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)
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