Nvidia made a splash in 2023 amid investor enthusiasm for artificial intelligence. The stock is already up more than 200% this year. But that's not all that's worth mentioning – other companies are also likely to benefit from the AI supply chain. Daniel Newman, CEO of Futurum Research, said he would “pass Nvidia because … a lot of people know that.” Instead, he named other top picks he's bullish on for next year. These are Advanced Micro Devices, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, he told CNBC's “Street Signs Asia” on Friday. Newman noted that AMD experienced a “big milestone” this week. The company launched artificial intelligence chips that will compete with Nvidia when it comes to AI applications. Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft said at an AMD investor event on Wednesday that they will use AMD's latest AI chip as an alternative to Nvidia. AMD shares rose nearly 10% on Thursday. Newman said Microsoft is “just too diverse not to be considered a really important partner,” although its long-term OpenAI strategy “will be important.” In November, Microsoft announced an AI chip, the Maia 100, that could compete with Nvidia's sought-after AI graphics processors. Microsoft is testing how Maia 100 meets the needs of its search engine Bing's AI chatbot (now called Copilot instead of Bing Chat) and GPT-3.5 Turbo, a large language model from OpenAI. When it comes to AWS, Newman likes the “open model approach.” “You will do great things in the company,” he said. Amazon has been working on two types of microchips for training and accelerating generative AI. These custom chips, Inferentia and Trainium, offer AWS customers an alternative to training their large language models on Nvidia GPUs. —CNBC's Kif Leswing and Jordan Novet contributed to this report.
