Intel betting on AI well beyond data centers

livemint.com:

Intel is preparing for rising demand for consumer products that can handle artificial-intelligence computing tasks on-site, betting that businesses will increasingly look beyond public data centers to meet their AI computing needs. The U.S.

chip-making giant is seeking to make AI capabilities commonplace in products ranging from computers to edge computing to software, with some companies already moving data away from public clouds to private environments, said Alexis Crowell, vice president and chief technology officer for Intel’s Asia-Pacific and Japan operations. “Our strategy is to get AI everywhere," Crowell said in an interview.

“If only one solution in the world can compute AI, you’re stuck. If every single…chip and software can compute AI, now you’ve got the flexibility." Rising enthusiasm for AI services and the vast amounts of computing power they require have led to a boom in data centers worldwide, including in Asia, where companies such as Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon are spending billions to build up their cloud services and other computing infrastructure.

Morgan Stanley estimates that Asia will account for more than a third of data-center capacity globally by 2027, with $100 billion in potential investments this decade. Crowell said the pace of demand for traditional data centers, however, is likely to slow as companies and organizations look to strike a balance between using public cloud infrastructure and storing data privately.

“I don’t think that massive burst is going to continue at that steep a trajectory," Crowell said. “Some of the data that I’m seeing…is now saying that companies are trying to bring back [outsourcing of IT] for data-privacy reasons or cost-control reasons." That aligns with a