Follow the money: The chips powering AI
episodePreviously titled “Follow the Money:The Chips powering AI” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 2, 2026
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What role do semiconductors play in the AI revolution?
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This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.
Vakuutusasioiden ei tarvitse olla hankalia. Meiltä saat helposti just sulle sopivan turvan ja tutkitusti alan parhaan palvelun. Aina hymyn verran paremmin. Valitse paras, valitse turva. Hymyile, olet turvassa.
The familiar sound of a computer booting up. You're probably near one right now. A phone in your hand, a laptop open in front of you. Switch it on and somewhere inside, a small piece of silicon starts doing sums, billions of them, every second. You've never seen it, but it's the reason the thing in front of you works. And this is that sound scaled up, a room full of machines, rows of them running hot, kept alive by fans that never stop. I'm standing in one right now at the BBC and it's quite cool in here. This is the noise behind the AI boom, behind every answer from ChatGPT, every image, every model that runs on chips, tens of thousands of them. I'm Sam Fenwick and this is Business Daily from the BBC World Service.
The chip industry is one of the fastest growing on earth. This year it's heading for a trillion dollars in sales. So today we're following the money from the company that designs the chip to the factory that builds it to the one machine that makes it possible and the island the whole thing depends on. This is the chip inside the AI boom. Who's getting rich off it and who's paying the bill? AI seems to be everywhere at the moment, from designing new medicines to forecasting the weather and driving autonomous cars. What it seems capable of is mind-blowing. You might think of it as software, something that lives on a screen, a chatbot, an app, an answer that appears out of nowhere. But every one of those applications runs on a chip, a piece of silicon that you can hold in your hand.
And the chip doing all the hard work started life running video games. Follow that chip and you follow the money behind AI. So let's start at the top of the chain with the company whose name you've probably heard of already.
Thank you.
NVIDIA, the most valuable company on earth right now. But here's the strange part. NVIDIA doesn't own a single factory that makes its chips. It designs them for someone else to build. Carl Freund is the founder of Cambrian AI Research, an independent firm whose clients, like many in the sector, include NVIDIA. He's spent years inside the industry at companies like AMD. So what does NVIDIA actually do?
NVIDIA designs chips. They design CPUs, they design networking chips, and they, of course, are most famous for designing graphics processing units, GPUs, which used to be used for gaming applications and now are primarily used for artificial intelligence. NVIDIA doesn't want to be a manufacturer of chips. That's a completely different business than designing chips. It's very capital intensive business.
So NVIDIA is the architect. It draws the chip. People call NVIDIA the tollbooth for AI, the idea being that you have to go through them to get there.
They definitely have control of the main road. Why? Because you can probably get your AI model up and running faster using NVIDIA than anything else. The software is widely available. Most software is built, run specifically on NVIDIA and imported to other chips.
There are other lanes now. So Google is building its own chips. So is Amazon and Microsoft. But NVIDIA still owns the main road. And here's why nobody will be able to catch them up.
NVIDIA shows the world how to do something that has probably never been done before in a production environment. And everybody says, oh, that's a good idea. I'm going to do the same thing. And they do it. It may take 18 months to two years to actually put that into silicon and then bring it to market. Well, meanwhile, NVIDIA engineers have been inventing the next thing you ought to think about adding to your chip. So they're always a generation ahead.
So every year there's a new, more advanced chip. And rivals like AMD and Google, well, they're running to catch a train that has already left the station.
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