Flips over chips; East versus West

Last week, the battle over chips, and ensuing flip flops, emerged on several fronts. Global chip-maker, Nvidia, invested $5 billion in the stock of Intel, a fierce competitor. The two unveiled a plan to co-develop data-centre and personal computer (PC) platforms. China shut out Nvidia’s accelerators from the former’s largest Internet companies. Huawei, a Chinese major, announced an aggressive roadmap for its Ascend AI hardware and mega-scale clusters. The rules of the game changed.