Chip Manufacturing Companies
Chip Manufacturing Companies
The world runs on tiny pieces of engineered silicon called chips — they power your phone, laptop, cloud servers, cars and the AI models that are shaping industries today. This article explains, in simple terms, what computer chips are, who some of the major chip-making companies are, and how they differ.
Chip manufacturing companies design, develop and (in some cases) fabricate the integrated circuits that do the computing in electronic devices. Some firms focus on designing chips and outsource manufacturing (“fabless”), while others own fabs and handle the whole manufacturing chain. The landscape includes companies that specialize in consumer CPUs and GPUs, others that build data-center and AI accelerators, and a few that push the limits with novel architectures.
What is a Computer Chip?
A computer chip (also called an integrated circuit) is a small slab of silicon into which millions, billions or even trillions of tiny transistors are etched. Those transistors act like switches: arranged and controlled, they perform arithmetic, logical operations and data movement that make software run. Chips come in many forms — CPUs for general tasks, GPUs for parallel math (very useful for graphics and AI), and specialized accelerators for ML, networking, or storage tasks.
Chip companies
Major chip companies are as follows:
- Nvidia
- Intel
- Cerebras
- AMD
NVIDIA
NVIDIA is often associated with product lines like GeForce for gamers and data-center accelerators such as H100 and the newer Blackwell family for AI.
Its leadership, product focus and software ecosystem (CUDA, cuDNN) make it a central player in modern AI infrastructure.
Intel
Intel is one of the oldest and best-known chip companies; historically it led the PC CPU market with the x86 architecture and still supplies many datacenter CPUs.
Intel both designs chips and owns fabrication facilities (fabs), which gives it an integrated manufacturing advantage — but also brings complex capital and process challenges.
In recent years Intel has pushed new Xeon server processors and invested heavily to expand manufacturing and AI capabilities.
Intel remains a major contender for general-purpose CPUs and is investing to regain competitiveness in AI accelerators and foundry services.
Cerebras
Cerebras is a specialist AI-hardware startup known for building wafer-scale AI chips — extremely large silicon pieces (Wafer-Scale Engine or WSE) designed for massive ML workloads.
Instead of many small chips stitched together, Cerebras makes a huge single chip (and tightly integrated systems) aimed at reducing communication overhead for very large models.
Their CS series systems and WSE-3 chips target high-end research and industrial AI customers who need extreme throughput for training large models.
Cerebras is a younger company compared to the hyperscalers and has pursued an IPO while expanding deployments in research and industry.
AMD
AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) designs CPUs (Ryzen, EPYC) and GPUs (Radeon) and competes directly with Intel in CPUs and with NVIDIA in certain GPU/accelerator segments.
AMD’s EPYC server processors and Ryzen consumer CPUs have been particularly competitive on performance and price in recent product generations.
AMD also offers specialized accelerators for data centers (Instinct/MI series) and continues to expand in high-performance computing and AI.
Under long-time CEO Lisa Su, AMD returned to strong growth and market relevance in both consumer and datacenter markets.
Comparison
| Company | Headquarters | Founded | CEO | Flagship / well-known chip models | Stock ticker |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA | Santa Clara, California, USA | 1993 | Jensen Huang | H100 (Hopper), Blackwell family (B-series), GeForce RTX (consumer) | NVDA |
| Intel | Santa Clara, California, USA | 1968 | Lip-Bu Tan | Xeon family (server CPUs: Xeon 6 / Granite Rapids lineage), Core (client), Intel Arc (GPU) | INTC |
| Cerebras | Sunnyvale, California, USA | 2016 | Andrew Feldman | Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE-3 / WSE-2) and CS series systems (CS-3) | Proposed: CBRS (IPO filing) |
| AMD | Santa Clara, California, USA | 1969 | Lisa Su | EPYC (server), Ryzen (consumer CPU), Radeon / Instinct / MI series (GPU/accelerator) | AMD |
Notes: Employee counts and product names above reflect recent public filings and press material; product lines evolve quickly (new chip generations and model names appear frequently).
If you’re choosing hardware or learning the field: NVIDIA is the go-to for AI GPUs and software ecosystem; Intel is a major integrated CPU-and-fab company focused on regaining server performance leadership; AMD is a strong CPU/GPU competitor particularly in servers and PCs; Cerebras is a niche but powerful option for extreme AI training workloads using wafer-scale chips.
