AI chips: The nuclear arms race of the 21st century, says Vinod Dham

Countries are pushing ahead with AI, seeing it as crucial for strategic dominance

The global race for dominance in artificial intelligence is drawing parallels to the nuclear arms race of the 20th century, says Vinod Dham, founder of IndoUS Venture Partners and a pioneer in the semiconductor industry.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Raisina Middle East, Mr Dham compared the importance of AI chips to the "nuclear weapons of the 1940s and 1950s".

“If you give away the recipe for building a bomb to everybody, then there'll be chaos in the world,” adding that the US was pursuing an appropriate policy of working in partnership with “trusted nations”.

“One thing that America has done that will make it very difficult for the rest of the world to replicate. There's some fundamental complex machinery needed to build these chips. And those machines are only being made by the US or companies it controls.”

His comments came as news emerged this week about DeepSeek's advancements in AI-driven chip design. Some experts say these advances could disrupt the current dominance of US-based companies like Nvidia in the graphics processing unit market.

It has also called into question investment strategies in the booming AI sector, especially as China-based DeepSeek was able to train its large language model with significantly less budget and in less time.

But as much as the US would like to keep an advantage in the sector, that will not be possible, he says, as other nations are figuring AI out.

In a wide ranging discussion, Mr Dham, who is sometimes referred to as the father of the Pentium chip because of his role in the development of Intel’s microprocessor, said the coronavirus pandemic five years ago acted as a springboard for the current AI-driven era.

“During the pandemic, everything shut down, and people had to stay home. Suddenly, there was a need for more computers. A huge demand and peak, which nobody had anticipated. It looked like a shortage, but it was really a shortage because demand went up and not because there was some issue with the supply chain.

“Subsequently, after the pandemic, it became apparent that AI would become crucial for strategic military use, warfare and weaponry.

“That made countries like the US, which is really at the leading edge, realise that maybe we should not have this technology freely given to everybody in the world, restricting those supplies to the so-called trusted nations that they felt it was okay to give it to. And that's really where we are today.

Mr Dham also reflected on the foundation story of Pentium chips and how pricing and technology has changed.

“When we were building Pentium, these chips were costing us maybe a couple of hundred dollars, $100, $50 to make. We were selling them for $200, $300, $400. The GPUs today, which are a very different type of a processor, cost $40,000 for just one set of chips.

“They are so expensive that an average person cannot buy them and use them at home. It’s a different ballgame than what we played during our time.”