AI Daily: Amazon, Nvidia say AI data center demand not slowing down

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

DEMAND NOT SEEN SLOWING: Amazon (AMZN) and Nvidia (NVDA) executives said Thursday that the construction of artificial intelligence data centers is not slowing down, as recession fears have some investors questioning whether tech companies will pull back on some their plans, CNBC’s Spencer Kimball reports. “There’s been really no significant change,” Kevin Miller, Amazon’s vice president of global data centers, said at conference organized by the Hamm Institute for American Energy. “We continue to see very strong demand, and we’re looking both in the next couple years as well as long term and seeing the numbers only going up.” 

NVIDIA CHIPS: Alibaba (BABA), Tencent (TCEHY) and ByteDance asked Nvidia to ship about 1M H20 chips, ideally by the end of May, but the actual number delivered fell short due to new U.S. curbs, Nikkei Asia’s Cheng Ting-Fang, Lauly Li and Cissy Zhou report. According to sources, the H20 GPU was specifically designed for sale in the Chinese market to comply with U.S. export controls, but Alibaba and others began preparing last year for the possibility that their shipments could also be curbed. 

PERPLEXITY AI: Google’s (GOOGL) contract with Lenovo’s  (LNVGY) Motorola blocked Perplexity AI from being the default assistant on new devices, Perplexity’s Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko testified at the search giant’s antitrust trial, Bloomberg’s Leah Nylen reports. Perplexity’s app will be preloaded on new devices, but not appear on the home screen, due to Google’s obligations. Perplexity’s AI app won’t be the default AI assistant “despite both parties wanting it to be,” Shevelenko told Judge Amit Mehta, who is overseeing the case. Motorola “can’t get out of their Google obligations and so they are unable to change the default assistant on the device.”