A group of technology companies, including Intel, Google, Arm, Qualcomm and Samsung, created the Unified Accelerator Fund (UXL) alliance, through which they will work together to remove the advantages that NVIDIA has as a dominant player in the artificial intelligence market, reports The Verge.

The alliance will undertake the mission of developing an open-source software package that will allow AI professionals to break away from NVIDIA’s technology. Additionally, the code that developers create will be able to function on any machine with any chip.

The Unified Acceleration Foundation is still in the design phase, but is expected to begin operations by the beginning of the second half of the year. UXL currently supports the OneAPI open standard. It was created by the Intel company.

Members of the alliance believe that it will remove restrictions on developers using specific programming languages, code sets and any other tools intended to bind developers to the use of certain architectures. For example – NVIDIA’s CUDA platform, which strives for this.

After focusing entirely on making chips for AI models like the H100, the company reached $2 trillion in market capitalization last month. This secured NVIDIA’s top spot among chip makers. The company is also planning to release new AI models soon – H200 GPU.

The chips that NVIDIA manufactures require developers to use the CUDA architecture, which supersedes all other chip manufacturers’ architectures by leaps and bounds. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, also shared that 4 million developers use CUDA.

However, technology companies are not giving up and continue to try to create alternative architectures of their own to displace the dominant one in the market.

For now, the creators of UXL intend to support NVIDIA hardware and code. Initially, the project will aim to develop options for AI applications.

The group of tech companies that make up the alliance is looking to collaborate with other powerhouses like Microsoft and Amazon to make sure the solutions they provide can be built into any chip or hardware.

On Thursday, Microsoft shares jumped 2%, bringing the tech giant’s market valuation to $2.903 trillion.

For Apple, the success is not so remarkable, on the contrary. While Microsoft was in the heyday of Thursday’s success, Apple’s market cap fell to $2.871 trillion as the stock dropped 0.9%. This decline is the first time since 2021 that the iPhone maker’s value is lower than Microsoft’s.

Microsoft’s joy at dethroning Apple from the top spot didn’t last long, however. As early as yesterday afternoon, Apple managed to reclaim its crown and a reversal occurred in which Microsoft’s valuation dropped again to $2.849 trillion.

The stock jump came shortly after Microsoft reported that its revenue rose 7 percent to $52.9 billion in the third quarter, beating analysts’ expectations, the company’s financial report showed. According to the report, the gains were mainly due to the Redmond, Washington-based company’s drive to integrate artificial intelligence technology into its cloud computing business.

The battle for the crown between the two tech giants continues, but which is the better?

Despite being the first U.S. company to achieve a $3 trillion market value in 2022, Apple has faced challenges due to declining iPhone sales, a significant contributor to its profits. This downturn has led to a drop in the company’s stock price, falling below the historic $3 trillion milestone. Despite entering the competitive AI market, Apple has not experienced the same stock surges driven by AI-related developments, contrasting with the success observed in companies like Microsoft.

Several major tech players, including Google, Amazon, and Meta, have strategically boosted their stock values by unveiling plans to develop AI-powered chatbots or incorporating AI technology into their products and operations, as reported by the Motley Fool. According to findings from the stock research platform Wall Street Zen, companies that disclosed AI initiatives witnessed an average stock price increase of 4.6%, while those that did not mention AI only saw a 2.4% uptick.

Here’s what analysts are expecting from the Windows maker in the quarter, as compiled by Bloomberg, versus how it performed in Q4 2020.

• Revenue: $44.25 billion expected versus $38 billion in Q4 2020
• Earnings per share: $1.92 expected versus $1.46 in Q4 2020
• Productivity and Business Processes: $13.9 billion expected versus $11.8 billion in Q4 2020
• Intelligent Cloud: $16.4 billion expected versus $13.4 billion in Q4 2020
• More Personal Computing: $13.8 billion expected versus $12.9 billion in Q4 2020

Microsoft’s cloud business has been the key to its impressive stock performance in recent years, capping it off with the company’s market capitalization closing about $2 trillion for the first time in its history in June. And analysts are expecting more from the business in Q4. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote in a note ahead of Microsoft’s earnings.:

“We expect another ‘beat and raise’ special from Redmond with Azure growth numbers (45%+ YoY) that exceed whisper expectations and headline numbers that comfortably exceed the Street’s $44 billion and $1.90 estimate.”

He added:

“We are seeing deal sizes continue to increase markedly as enterprise-wide digital transformation shifts are accelerating with CIOs all focused on readying their respective enterprises for a cloud driven architecture.”

The pandemic forced many companies to build out capabilities for their employees to work from home, driving businesses to spend more on cloud resources. And with more employees seeking work-from-home opportunities, firms will need to keep meeting those requests, ensuring they continue to invest in cloud capabilities moving forward.