It’s been another busy week of tech coverage at theCUBE, with SC23 and Microsoft Corp.’s annual Ignite 2023 conference bringing plenty of intrigue.

For industry analyst John Furrier (pictured, left), it seemed like just about everyone has news about chips these days.

“Just a ton of chips from all around the enterprise data center world,” he said.

Dave Vellante (right) discussed that development with Furrier and much more on the latest episode of theCUBE Podcast. Given that most of these chips are Arm-based, is Amazon Web Services Inc.’s lead going to hold?

“Amazon announced Graviton in 2018. I think they actually began shipping Inferentia in 2019, Trainium in 2021. So they got a big lead,” Vellante said. “But is that lead sustainable? Is it like, no compression algorithm for experience? Or is there just so much innovation around these chip designs?”

From a traditional competitive standpoint trajectory, Amazon would appear to have a great lead, according to Furrier. That lead is going to give them experience.

“However, the AI workloads are more complex than traditional workloads, especially traditional cloud workloads. I hate to even use that term — I think that’s the first time I’ve ever said that the cloud is a traditional workload,” Furrier said. “But we’re seeing customers look at the complexity of the AI deployments right now, and they’re different. I think that’s the only wildcard.”

That’s a subject Furrier said he will discuss with Amazon Web Services Inc. CEO Adam Selipsky during an upcoming sit-down interview in advance of this year’s AWS re:Invent. The other thing that’s going to be interesting that came out of SC23 that will probably play into re:Invent are the challenges around networking, according to Furrier.

“Speed is going to come in at the processor side,” he said. “Do you optimize for GPUs, CPUs or TPUs? Do you want more compute and GPU processing power? Or are you optimized for networking? This is a really big discussion.”

Cold war dynamic

There is currently an interesting dynamic emerging involving the silicon players and the hardware players versus the cloud, according to Furrier. The theme of Supercloud 5, an editorial event presented by SiliconANGLE and theCUBE, is “The Battle for AI Supremacy.”

“It’s an interesting kind of Cold War dynamic, because the suppliers of silicon have the hyperscalers as their customers, and the hyperscalers set the agenda because they have the scale on their buying power, they’ve got financial leverage,” Furrier said. “However, though, the silicon players have great leverage too, in the sense that they’re making a lot of money.”

As the silicon players look at the clouds building their own silicon, like AWS, there’s an emerging kind of game going on, according to Furrier. There are tier two clouds, referred to as superclouds by theCUBE analysts, emerging.

“Nvidia and the semiconductor companies have the scale and leverage to do a similar cloud with bare metal as some of these hosting providers like we’re seeing emerge out of the HPC world,” Furrier said. “The HPC world could be bursting competitors in the marketplace with this fabless concept.”

At Supercloud 5, which runs Nov. 28 to Dec. 1, theCUBE will gather a community of hyperscale computing experts, technologists, investors and thought leaders to explore generative AI and its impact on major cloud titans. There’s going to be a wealth of content involved, according to Furrier.

“We’re going to compare the clouds, who’s winning, who’s not winning, or who’s slower,” he said. “We’re going to break it down with all the people in our community, and unpack all the core issues.”

All in on AI

The action is in the cloud right now, Vellante noted. But IBM Corp., Oracle Corp. and every independent software vendor in the world right now is focused on the big trend right now.

“Every ISV in the world, ISV slash data platform slash — the [MongoDBs], the Salesforce, to the Snowflakes, the Databricks, Intuit — name a software company, you can’t name one that’s not injecting AI into its platform,” Vellante said. “Then, OpenAI just a couple of weeks ago … just made it much easier to do so.”

Microsoft is all in on AI right now, according to Furrier. What will be interesting to find out from Amazon in the weeks ahead, including at re:Invent, is the company’s future trajectory when it comes to AI.

“Are they even set up for it? They’re going to say yes, of course,” Furrier said.

Watch the full podcast below to find out why these industry pros were mentioned:

Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS
Andy Jassy, president and CEO of Amazon
Jas Tremblay, GM for data center solutions group at Broadcom
Renu Raman, founder and CEO of Terizza
Jerry Chen, general partner at Greylock Partners
Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft
Sarbjeet Johal, founder and CEO of Stackpane
George Gilbert, principal at TechAlpha Partners
Matt Wood, VP of analytics, business intelligence and machine learning at AWS
Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of database, analytics and ML at AWS
Seamus Jones, director for server technical marketing engineering at Dell Technologies
Jonathan Ross, founder and CEO of Groq
Mark E. Sorenson, author, A Restaurant at Jaffa
David Floyer, CTO and co-founder of Wikibon
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia
Rob Strechay, analyst at SiliconANGLE Media Inc. and host of theCUBE
Savannah Peterson, founder and chief unicorn of Savvy Millennial and host of theCUBE
Rebecca Knight, host of theCUBE

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Photo: SiliconANGLE