Cloud

Microsoft is an American technology company founded in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Its AI work combines a partnership with OpenAI, the Copilot products and its own in-house MAI and Phi models.

NVIDIA is the company that created the GPU in 1999 and, through the CUDA architecture and the chips behind AlexNet, became a central supplier of computing power for modern AI.

Amazon is the American technology company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994. Through Amazon Web Services it became a major cloud provider, and it has built its own AI models, chips and assistants, including the Nova models and Trainium chips.

ByteDance is a Chinese internet company founded in 2012, whose AI work includes the Doubao chatbot, the TRAE coding tool, the Seed model team and the Volcano Engine cloud platform.[^1]

Google's first-generation Tensor Processing Unit is a custom chip built to speed up neural-network inference in its data centers. Deployed in 2015 and revealed in 2016, it showed that dedicated accelerators could beat CPUs and GPUs on cost-performance.

Google TPU v2 is the second-generation Tensor Processing Unit announced in May 2017. It added floating-point support and the bfloat16 format, and scaled to 256-chip pods rated at 11.5 petaFLOPS.

NVIDIA's A100 is a data-center GPU, the first built on the Ampere architecture. Announced on 14 May 2020, it introduced third-generation Tensor Cores, the TF32 format and Multi-Instance GPU, and became a standard building block for training large language models.

The NVIDIA H100 is the first data-center GPU built on NVIDIA's Hopper architecture, announced in March 2022 with 80 billion transistors, HBM3 memory, FP8 Tensor Cores and a Transformer Engine aimed at large language models.

vLLM is an open-source serving system for large language models, built on PagedAttention, which manages the KV cache the way an operating system manages virtual memory. It reports 2-4x higher throughput than earlier serving systems at the same latency.

NVIDIA's GB200 NVL72 is a liquid-cooled rack that links 72 Blackwell GPUs and 36 Grace CPUs into a single NVLink domain aimed at trillion-parameter AI. Announced at GTC in March 2024, it is the building block of NVIDIA's Blackwell-generation DGX SuperPOD.

TPU7x (Ironwood) is Google's seventh-generation TPU: 192 GB of high-bandwidth memory per chip, FP8 matrix units, 9,216 chips per pod, and a programming model that exposes two devices per chip.

Huawei CloudMatrix384 is a Huawei Cloud service instance built on Atlas 900 A3 SuperPoDs, each linking up to 384 Ascend 910C chips so that they work as one computer.

A rack-scale NVIDIA system announced in March 2025 that links 72 Blackwell Ultra GPUs and 36 Grace CPUs into one unit, rated at 1.5 times the AI performance of GB200 NVL72.

AMD's data-center GPU for AI, introduced in June 2025 on the CDNA 4 architecture, with 288 GB of HBM3E memory and very high low-precision throughput aimed at generative AI inference, positioned against Nvidia's Blackwell generation.

AWS Trainium3 is AWS's first 3-nanometer AI chip, delivering 2.52 petaflops of FP8 compute per chip and scaling to 144 chips in a Trn3 UltraServer, available through Amazon EC2 from December 2025.[^1][^2]

NVIDIA Rubin is NVIDIA’s six-chip AI platform and the successor to Blackwell, announced at CES 2026. It targets lower-cost AI token generation, with partner products and cloud instances scheduled for 2026.

Satya Nadella is the chief executive of Microsoft, who has led the company since 2014 and pushed it toward cloud computing and AI partnerships, including the 2019 deal with OpenAI.

Indian-born American executive who rose from leading Google Chrome and Android to become CEO of Google and then Alphabet, and who has overseen the company's push into AI, including Bard and Google DeepMind.

Oracle is an American software company founded in 1977 that sells database software, enterprise applications, and cloud infrastructure and hardware. A 2025 disclosure of cloud commitments with OpenAI reshaped its standing among the world's largest companies.

Huawei is a Chinese information and communications technology company founded in Shenzhen in 1987. It designs its own Ascend AI chips and the software and large computing systems built around them.

Tencent is a Chinese internet company founded in 1998, known for QQ, WeChat and video games. Since 2023 its Hunyuan model line has been its main AI effort, later branded Hy.

Alibaba Group is a technology company founded in 1999 that describes itself as focused on AI + Cloud and commerce; its Qwen models and data centre build-out are central to that positioning.

Salesforce is a San Francisco enterprise software company founded in 1999 that sells customer relationship management software by subscription, and has grown into one of the largest business software firms in the world.

Baidu is a Beijing-based Chinese internet company founded in 2000. It runs China's dominant search engine and develops the ERNIE model family and the ERNIE Bot chatbot.

Alibaba Cloud is the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group and the developer of the Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen) large language model family, which is released as both open weights and proprietary models.

A 2012 NIPS paper by Jeffrey Dean, Andrew Ng and colleagues that introduced DistBelief, a framework for training deep networks across clusters of thousands of machines, together with the Downpour SGD and Sandblaster optimisation procedures.

Databricks is a San Francisco software company founded in 2013 by seven people behind Apache Spark, which grew out of the University of California, Berkeley AMPLab project [1][2]. Its valuation rose from $38 billion in 2021 to $188 billion in 2026 [4][11].

Hugging Face is an AI platform company founded in 2016. Its Hub shares models, datasets and demo apps, its libraries include Transformers, and in September 2026 Nvidia agreed to acquire it.

A New Jersey cloud company that began as an ethereum miner and became a large-scale GPU computing provider for AI, backed by NVIDIA and listed on Nasdaq in 2025 alongside a major OpenAI deal.

Amazon SageMaker is AWS's fully managed service for building, training and hosting machine learning models, announced in 2017. It combines hosted notebooks, distributed training and scalable inference endpoints, and each part can be used on its own.

Google's third-generation Tensor Processing Unit, introduced in 2018, with doubled HBM capacity, higher peak throughput, lower power draw and liquid cooling for denser pods.

Google's TPU v4 is a machine-learning chip and supercomputer deployed since 2020, built into 4,096-chip pods with optically reconfigurable networking; PaLM and Gemini models were trained on it.

The Hugging Face Hub is the platform where people share machine-learning models, datasets and demo apps. By September 2026 it had more than 3 million models and 18 million users.

The OpenAI API is OpenAI's commercial developer platform, announced on 11 June 2020 with GPT-3. Over the following years it grew into a platform for building AI agents, adding the Responses API, Agents SDK, AgentKit and other tools.

OpenRouter is a marketplace and gateway for large language models, started in early 2023, that lets developers reach hundreds of models from many providers through one interface. It reports more than 10 million users and a $113 million Series B.

Amazon Bedrock is AWS's managed, serverless service for accessing foundation models from several companies, announced on 13 April 2023. It became generally available in September 2023 and added Amazon's own Nova models and the AgentCore agent platform later.

Hunyuan is Tencent's first proprietary large foundation model, unveiled in September 2023 and offered to enterprises through Tencent Cloud. The line was later branded Hy.

TensorRT-LLM is NVIDIA's open-source library for speeding up and optimizing large language model inference on NVIDIA GPUs, publicly released on 19 October 2023 and usable free from GitHub or as part of NVIDIA NeMo.

NVIDIA's H200, announced in November 2023, is a data center GPU that was the first to use HBM3e memory, offering 141 GB at 4.8 TB/s — nearly double the A100's capacity — and roughly double the H100's inference speed on Llama 2 70B.

Azure Maia 100 is Microsoft's first custom AI chip, announced in November 2023 and built to train and run large language models inside its own Azure data centres rather than being sold.

Google TPU v5p is a 2023 TPU generation with 459 teraflops of peak BF16 and FP8 compute per chip, 95 GiB of HBM, and 8,960 chips per pod.

AMD's data-center GPU for generative AI, released in December 2023. Built on the CDNA 3 architecture with a chiplet design, it leads with 192 GB of HBM3 memory, which AMD contrasted with the 80 GB on Nvidia's H100.

SGLang is an open-source system for running complex language model programs: a frontend language plus a runtime that reuses cached attention state and speeds up structured output, reporting up to 6.4x higher throughput than prior inference systems.

The Kunlunxin P800 is a Chinese AI accelerator launched in 2024, the third generation of Kunlunxin's line, built on its own XPU-P architecture and used in large training clusters and in customer deployments.

Mistral Large is the French company Mistral AI's first flagship proprietary large language model, released on 26 February 2024 with a 32K-token context window, native fluency in five languages, and built-in function calling and JSON output.

NVIDIA's data-center GPU for the Blackwell generation, announced in March 2024 as the successor to Hopper, built from two joined dies and paired with NVLink and FP4 support for large-scale AI training and inference.

Cohere's 104-billion-parameter language model, announced in April 2024, is tuned for retrieval-augmented generation and multi-step tool use in business settings; it launched first on Microsoft Azure and was also released as open weights.

ByteDance's Doubao model family, launched through Volcano Engine in May 2024, offered general-purpose, speech and image models at prices far below rivals, helping set off a price war among Chinese providers.

Test-time compute is the computation a model spends while answering a prompt, beyond what training already fixed into its weights. A 2024 study by Snell et al. showed how to spend it adaptively, and how it can stand in for a bigger model.

Replit Agent is an AI system from Replit that builds and deploys applications from a short natural-language description. It opened in early access to Replit Core subscribers in September 2024, and the company asked users to treat it as alpha software.

A data-center GPU announced by AMD on 10 October 2024, built on third-generation CDNA with 256 GB of HBM3E memory at 6 TB/s and aimed at models with a trillion parameters.

Google TPU v6e, also called Trillium, is a Google Cloud AI accelerator whose published specifications cover per-chip BF16 and FP8 compute, high-bandwidth HBM, and pod-scale interconnects for large training jobs.

Amazon Nova is Amazon's family of foundation models, introduced on 3 December 2024 and offered exclusively in Amazon Bedrock. It spans text understanding models from Micro to Pro, plus Canvas for images and Reel for video, and was succeeded by Nova 2 in December 2025.

AWS Trainium2 is Amazon Web Services' second-generation machine-learning chip, sold through 16-chip EC2 Trn2 instances and 64-chip Trn2 UltraServers, and pitched by AWS as offering better price performance than comparable GPU instances.

Qwen2.5-Max is Alibaba's large mixture-of-experts model, announced in January 2025. It was offered through Qwen Chat and the Alibaba Cloud API, and its weights were not released.

Hunyuan Turbo S is a fast-thinking model released by Tencent on 27 February 2025, built on a hybrid Mamba-Transformer design with 560 billion total parameters. Its weights were not released.

Hunyuan-T1 is Tencent's deep-reasoning model, officially released on 21 March 2025 and built on the Hunyuan-TurboS base. Tencent did not release its weights.

Amazon Nova Act is a model and SDK, released in March 2025, that lets AI agents carry out tasks inside a web browser by breaking workflows into small commands developers interleave with Python code.

AMD Instinct MI350X is a data-center GPU in AMD's MI350 series, built on the CDNA 4 architecture with up to 288 GB of HBM3E memory, up to 8 TB/s of bandwidth and a 1,000 W board power.

Kiro is Amazon Web Services' agentic IDE, announced in July 2025, which turns a prompt into user stories, a design document and a task list before writing code — an approach its makers call spec-driven development.

Qwen3-Max is Alibaba's proprietary trillion-parameter language model, released in September 2025 and served through Alibaba's API. It is the Max-tier flagship that followed Qwen2.5-Max.

The AMD Instinct MI400 is AMD's next-generation data-center GPU for AI, expected in 2026 with 432 GB of HBM4 memory, and designed to be deployed inside AMD's Helios rack-scale system.

Microsoft's Maia 200 is an inference accelerator introduced on 26 January 2026, built on TSMC's 3-nanometer process with 216 GB of HBM3e memory and more than 10 petaflops at FP4, aimed at serving models such as OpenAI's GPT-5.2.

Zhenwu 810E is an AI processor designed by Alibaba's chip team T-Head, listed in January 2026 with 96 GB of high-bandwidth memory, aimed at training, inference and autonomous driving, and already deployed in large clusters on Alibaba Cloud.

Snowflake is a cloud data platform company that also builds its own open language models; its Arctic model pairs a dense transformer with a sparse mixture of experts and shipped under Apache 2.0.

Intel is a semiconductor company. Its 2017 purchase of Mobileye, later partly floated, and its decision to keep Falcon Shores as an internal test chip show how it enters and steps back from adjacent markets.

Eddie Wu is a co-founder of Alibaba Group who has been its chief executive officer and a director since September 2023, after more than two decades in technical and business roles across Alipay, Alimama and Taobao.

Wang Jian is the founder of Alibaba Cloud and a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. He was previously a Zhejiang University psychology professor and Microsoft Research Asia executive, and directs Zhijiang Laboratory.

Jensen Huang is a founder of NVIDIA and has served as its president, CEO and board member since the company was founded in 1993. NVIDIA credits the company's invention of the GPU and its work in accelerated computing to that era.

Lisa Su is an electrical engineer who became AMD's president and chief executive officer in 2014 and chair of its board in 2022, serving during the company's push into AI accelerators.

Accel is a venture capital firm that describes itself as the first partner to exceptional teams everywhere. Its portfolio runs to hundreds of companies, and it invests at both seed and late stages, including several large AI-related rounds.

AWS Trainium is a chip built by Amazon Web Services for deep learning training, sold through EC2 Trn1 instances that AWS says cut training costs by up to 50% compared with comparable instances.

AWS Inferentia2 is Amazon Web Services' second-generation chip built for inference, offering 32 GB of high-bandwidth memory, up to 190 TFLOPS in FP16 and up to 12 chips per EC2 Inf2 instance.

A KV cache keeps the key and value vectors a model has already computed for earlier tokens, so each new token reuses them instead of recomputing. Its memory footprint is what makes high-throughput serving hard to scale.

Google TPU v5e is a 2023 machine-learning accelerator chip with one TensorCore per chip, 197 TFLOP of bfloat16 peak compute, and 256-chip pods, positioned for both training and serving.

AMD is a chip designer whose data center AI business centres on Instinct GPUs and APUs, expanded through the Xilinx and ZT Systems acquisitions and capped by a 6-gigawatt OpenAI supply deal.

Google, part of Alphabet, works on AI at several levels at once: it designs its own TPU chips, trains large language models such as PaLM and Gemini, and brought its research labs together as Google DeepMind in 2023.

The GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip is an NVIDIA module that puts a 72-core Arm CPU and a Hopper GPU in one package joined by NVLink-C2C, pairing fast HBM with up to 480 GB of CPU memory for AI and technical computing.

T. Rowe Price is a US asset management firm founded in 1937, reporting $1.86 trillion in assets under management and known for retirement and target-date investing. It was also a significant investor in Anthropic's $13 billion Series F round.

The International Energy Agency is a Paris-based intergovernmental organisation founded in 1974 to respond to oil supply disruptions. It publishes the annual World Energy Outlook and, since 2024, has run work on energy and AI.

Informatica is an American software company founded in 1993 that sells enterprise cloud data management and data integration software, from data catalog and governance to master data management. It went public in 1999, was taken private in 2015, relisted in 2021, and was acquired by Salesforce in 2025.

A software-focused investment firm that dates its software investing to a 1995 bet, reports over $90 billion in regulatory assets under management, and has invested in more than 900 companies worldwide.

Talen Energy is an independent power producer created in 2015 from the spinoff of PPL's competitive generation business, later taken private by Riverstone, restructured through bankruptcy, and now a nuclear power supplier to Amazon.

Cerebras Systems is an American AI chip company founded in 2015 that builds wafer-scale processors — single chips made from a whole silicon wafer — and the computers around them, from the WSE and CS-1 to the WSE-3 and CS-3.

Apache MXNet is an open-source deep learning library that offers both symbolic and imperative programming, runs from mobile devices to GPU clusters, and ships bindings for eight languages. Its paper was posted in December 2015 by Tianqi Chen, Mu Li and colleagues.

Kairos Power, founded in 2016, is an American company developing a fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor using TRISO fuel. It is building the Hermes demonstration reactor in Tennessee and plans 500 MW of projects with Google by 2035.

T-Head Semiconductor is Alibaba's chip design unit, founded in 2018. It has released the Hanguang 800 AI inference chip, the Yitian 710 server CPU and the Zhenwu PPU AI processor, which Alibaba uses at scale for its Qwen models.

American energy company headquartered in Baltimore, one of the largest electricity producers in the United States, known for its 2024 agreement to restart Three Mile Island Unit 1.

Amazon Titan is a family of foundation models built by Amazon for Amazon Bedrock, covering text generation, embeddings and image generation. It was announced in 2023 and later succeeded by Amazon Nova.

Amazon Q is a generative AI assistant for work from AWS. It was announced in preview at re:Invent on 28 November 2023, respects each user's permissions and became generally available as Amazon Q Business on 30 April 2024.

Hunyuan Turbo is Tencent's large language model, released on Tencent Cloud in September 2024 and tuned for lower training and serving costs. It was succeeded in February 2025 by Hunyuan Turbo S, which cut API prices further.

A speech-to-speech foundation model in Amazon's Nova family, announced on 8 April 2025, which handles recognition, understanding and speech generation in a single model rather than a chain of separate ones.

Amazon Nova Premier is the most capable model of the first Nova generation, available in Amazon Bedrock from 30 April 2025. It handles text, images and video with a 1-million-token context window, and also serves as a teacher model for smaller Nova models.

Amazon Nova 2 is the second generation of Amazon's Nova models, released at AWS re:Invent in December 2025. Its first member, Nova 2 Lite, is a fast reasoning model available in Amazon Bedrock with a 1-million-token context.

A speech-to-text model from Microsoft AI released in April 2026 that transcribes 25 languages, runs Copilot's Voice Mode, and starts at $0.36 per hour of audio.

Magnetar is an investment firm reporting more than $17 billion in assets under management as of mid-2026, working across alternative credit and fixed income, quantitative investing, and ventures.

Blue Owl Capital is an alternative asset manager with $330 billion in assets under management, built from three separate businesses: Oak Street in real estate, Dyal Capital in stakes in other asset managers, and Owl Rock in private credit.

A Chinese artificial intelligence infrastructure company that builds the middle layer letting many models run on many kinds of chips, and also releases the open Megrez model family.

Kevin Scott is Microsoft's chief technology officer, appointed on 24 January 2017 after engineering leadership roles at LinkedIn, Google and AdMob. In March 2024 Microsoft said he continued as CTO and EVP of AI, responsible for all-up AI strategy.

Coatue is an investment firm that puts money to work in both public and private technology markets, with a private portfolio of more than 250 tech companies and a growing profile in AI through backing for Anthropic and Anysphere.

Senior executive at Tencent: Senior Executive Vice President and head of the Cloud and Smart Industries Group since October 2018, previously president of the Social Network Group responsible for QQ, and chairman of Tencent Music Entertainment Group.

Jingren Zhou is a computer scientist at Alibaba, where he is chief technology officer of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, leads the Tongyi AI lab and joined the Alibaba Partnership in 2025; he was named a 2024 ACM Fellow.

GroqChip is Groq's AI processor, built for fully deterministic execution with no run-to-run variation. It pairs a 14-nanometer die with 230 MB of on-die SRAM, up to 750 INT8 TOPS and RealScale chip-to-chip links, and ships both as a chip and on the PCIe GroqCard.

AWS Inferentia is a custom chip designed by AWS for running trained machine-learning models, sold to customers through EC2 Inf1 instances. It aims to make inference cheaper and faster than general-purpose instances.