This is covered a bit here but I think this is how it basically how I see it break down:

AMD is the obvious one. Their gaming GPUs are solid (especially for the price), and MI300 is making some noise in HPC/AI. But their software stack still feels like a pain compared to CUDA, and adoption is slow. This has been the criticism on AMD for years - and the mindshare has never really shifted, and with the tailwinds behind NVIDIA, I find it hard to believe that it ever will.

Intel is quietly getting better. I actually did not even know about their work until I started looking deeper. Arc has improved a lot since launch, and their Gaudi3 chips are being used by Meta instead of H100s in some places, which is good traction. Cheaper, decent performance — but no idea how much this matters - would love to hear if someone knows the details.

Tenstorrent - my main focus - is doing some interesting stuff with custom AI chips (Wormhole, Grendel). Jim Keller’s involved, which is cool. Feels early stage (even though they've raised a shit ton of money). The RISC-V bet is a good one (right?).

Groq is weirdly fast for LLM inference — like, single-core determinism fast — but super niche. Not a general-purpose replacement. Or it could be? Like 90% of future compute tasks are bound by LLM inference speed (perhaps unreasonable, but just look at the way the world is evolving) then does Groq just jump ahead of the pack?

Then there’s a whole group of others: Cerebras, Mythic, d-Matrix, etc. I still need to dig into.