The Custom AI Chip Race: Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft Are All Building Silicon to Break Free from Nvidia

Every major hyperscaler is now shipping custom AI silicon. Meta announced four MTIA chip generations in two years — including a 1,700-watt RISC-V superchip delivering 30 petaflops. Google's TPU Ironwood is in its seventh generation. Amazon's Trainium3 powers both Anthropic and OpenAI. Microsoft's Maia 200 packs 140 billion transistors. Together, custom chips could capture 15-25% of the AI accelerator market by 2030. But Nvidia still holds 90%+ of training and 60-75% of inference. This is the story of an industry spending tens of billions to build alternatives to a supplier it can't stop buying from.