Shipments of heterogeneous artificial intelligence (AI) chipsets, used in generative AI workloads, are forecast to reach more than 1.8 billion shipments by 2030 due to the growth of the technology embedded into devices like laptops, smartphones and other form factors, according to new data from ABI Research.
The growth will be helped by strong partnerships between hardware chipsets and software players to create unified propositions. The collaborations will allow for productivity-focused applications to be deployed on-devices. ABI said this will help to spur demand and shortened replacement cycles for end devices like smartphones and AI PCs.
“Cloud deployment will act as a bottleneck for generative AI to scale due to concerns about data privacy, latency and networking costs,” said Paul Schell, industry analyst at ABI. “Solving these challenges requires moving AI inferencing closer to the end-user — this is where on-device AI has a clear value proposition as it eliminates these risks and can more effectively scale productivity-enhancing AI applications.”
ABI said that AI applications running on-device will drive significant growth for personal and work devices, which will reflect in the increased penetration of heterogeneous AI chipsets.
“Chip vendors and OEMs should look to expand the productivity AI application ecosystem to tempt more customers and mature the offering,” Schell said. “This will create opportunities analogous to the growth previously spurred by the expansion of Android and web-based applications in their respective markets and require reaching a critical mass of applications that appeal to a broad range of customers in consumer and enterprise markets. Success in creating popular and useful applications could make or break the transition to on-device AI.”
