Gaudi2 is named after the artist Antoni Gaudí who designed the Barcelona Cathedral knowing that it would never be finished until he was long dead.

Gaudi2 is the second-generation processor by Habana Labs, an Israeli AI chip startup Intel bought in late 2019 for about $2 billion. AI chip start-ups have been getting huge investments in recent years as AI computing is one of the fastest-growing areas for data centres.

Chipzilla is doing its best to take market share away from Nvidia has been a challenge as many AI researchers and companies have been accustomed to using Nvidia’s software platform CUDA. Intel said that it has been focusing on its software development.

Intel’s CUDA-beating software platform is an open standard, free to download and use from GitHub, the software development site.

Gaudi2 is twice as fast as Habana's previous AI chip and manufactured at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s 7-nanometer transistor technology from 16-nanometers previously.

Intel also launched a new chip called Greco for inferencing work: taking an AI algorithm and making a prediction or identifying an object.

Intel data centre boss Sandra Rivera said the AI chip market is estimated to grow some 25 per cent a year in the next five years to reach around $50 billion.

"We intend to invest and innovate to lead this market,” she said, adding that increasingly the investments will be in software, both for expanding Intel's team and buying other companies.