For US chip giant Intel, the darling of the computer age before it fell on hard times, things might have been quite different.

About seven years ago, the company had the chance to buy a stake in OpenAI, then a fledgling non-profit research organisation working in a little-known field called generative artificial intelligence, four people with direct knowledge of those discussions said.

Over several months in 2017 and 2018, executives at the two companies discussed various options, including Intel buying a 15% stake for US$1-billion in cash, three of the people said. They also discussed Intel taking an additional 15% stake in OpenAI if it made hardware for the start-up at cost price, two people said.

Intel ultimately decided against a deal, partly because then-CEO Bob Swan did not think generative AI models would make it to market in the near future and thus repay the chip maker’s investment, according to three of the sources, who all requested anonymity to discuss confidential matters.

OpenAI was interested in an investment from Intel because it would have reduced its reliance on Nvidia’s chips and allowed the start-up to build its own infrastructure, two of the people said. The deal also fell through because Intel’s data centre unit did not want to make products at cost, the people added.

An Intel spokesman did not address questions about the potential deal. Swan did not respond to a request for comment and OpenAI declined to comment.

Intel’s decision not to invest in OpenAI, which went on to launch the ground-breaking ChatGPT in 2022 and is now reportedly valued at about $80-billion, has not previously been made public.

Strategic misfortunes

It is among a series of strategic misfortunes that have seen the company, which was at the cutting edge of computer chips in the 1990s and 2000s, stumble in the era of AI, according to interviews for this article with nine people familiar with the matter including former Intel executives and industry experts.

Last week, Intel’s second-quarter earnings triggered a stock price decline of more than a quarter of its value in its worst trading day since 1974. For the first time in 30 years, the tech company is worth less than $100-billion. The erstwhile market kingpin, whose marketing slogan “Intel Inside” long represented the gold standard of quality, is still struggling to get a blockbuster AI chip product to market.

Intel is now dwarfed by $2.6-trillion rival Nvidia, which has pivoted from videogame graphics to AI chips needed to build, train and operate large generative AI systems like OpenAI’s GPT4 and Meta Platforms’ Llama models. Intel has also fallen behind the $218-billion AMD.

Asked about its AI progress, the Intel spokesman referred to recent comments by CEO Pat Gelsinger, who said the company’s third-generation Gaudi AI chip, which it aims to launch in the third quarter of this year, would outperform rivals.

Gelsinger said the company had “20-plus” customers for the second and third generation of Gaudi and that its next-generation Falcon Shores AI chip would launch in late 2025.

“We are nearing the completion of a historic pace of design and process technology innovation, and we are encouraged by the product pipeline we’re building to capture a greater share of the AI market going forward,” the spokesman said.

On the OpenAI front, Microsoft stepped in to make an investment in 2019, propelling itself to the forefront of the AI era triggered by the 2022 release of ChatGPT and a frenzy of activity among the largest companies in the world to deploy AI.

Missed chance

Although in hindsight the prospective deal was a missed chance for Intel, the company has been gradually losing the battle for AI supremacy for more than decade, according to the former executives and industry experts interviewed.

“Intel failed in AI because they didn’t present a cohesive product strategy to their customers,” said Dylan Patel, founder of semiconductor research group SemiAnalysis.

For more than two decades, Intel believed the CPU, or central processing unit, like the ones that power desktop and laptop computers, could more effectively handle the processing tasks required to build and run AI models, according to four former Intel executives with direct knowledge of the company’s plans.

Intel engineers viewed the graphics processing unit (GPU) videogaming chip architecture, used by rivals Nvidia and AMD, as comparatively “ugly”, one of the people said.

Read: Intel’s nightmare: ARM targets half of PC market by 2029

By the mid-2000s, though, researchers had discovered that the gaming chips were far more efficient than CPUs at handling the intensive data crunching necessary to build and train large AI models. Because GPUs are designed for game graphics, they can perform an enormous number of calculations in parallel.

Nvidia’s engineers have spent years since then modifying the GPU architecture to tune them for AI uses, and built the software necessary to harness the capabilities. “When AI hit … Intel just didn’t have the right processor at the right time,” said Lou Miscioscia, analyst at Japanese investment bank Daiwa.

Since 2010, Intel has made at least four attempts to produce a viable AI chip, including acquiring two start-ups and at least two major homegrown efforts. None has made a dent against Nvidia or AMD in the rapidly expanding and lucrative market, according to three people with direct knowledge of the company’s internal activities.

Intel’s entire data centre business is expected to generate sales of $13.9-billion this year — which includes the company’s AI chips but many other designs too — while analysts expect Nvidia to generate data centre revenue of $105.9-billion.

In 2016, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich sought to buy its way into the AI business by acquiring Nervana Systems for $408-million. Intel executives were attracted to Nervana’s technology, which was similar to a tensor processing unit (TPU) chip made by Google, according to two former executives.

The TPU — specifically designed for building, or training, large generative AI models — stripped away a conventional GPU’s features useful for videogames and focused exclusively on optimising AI calculations.

Nervana enjoyed some success with customers including Meta Platforms for its processor, though not enough to prevent Intel from switching horses and abandoning the project.

In 2019, Intel bought a second chip start-up, Habana Labs, for $2-billion before it shut down Nervana’s efforts in 2020.