Google has pierced Nvidia’s aura of invulnerability

NO COMPANY has benefited more from the craze for artificial intelligence (AI) than Nvidia, these days the world’s most valuable company.

Over the past three years, investors have bid its shares into the stratosphere on the belief that its dominance of the market for AI chips is unassailable. Rival chipmakers and startups alike have tried to elbow their way into its business, with little success.

Now, however, one of Nvidia’s biggest customers has emerged as its fiercest competitor yet. This month, Google – which pioneered the “transformer” algorithms underpinning the current AI wave – launched Gemini 3, a cutting-edge model that outperforms those of its biggest rivals, including OpenAI, on most benchmarks.