Intel, Google, Microsoft, Meta and other tech giants announced on Thursday they are establishing a new industry group, the Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) Promoter Group, to guide the development of the components that link together AI accelerator chips in data centers.

The UALink Promoter Group also counts AMD, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Broadcom and Cisco among its members. The group is proposing a new industry standard to connect the AI accelerator chips within a growing number of servers.

"The industry needs an open standard that can be moved forward very quickly, in an open (format) that allows multiple companies to add value to the overall ecosystem," Forrest Norrod, AMD's general manager of data center solutions, said on Wednesday. "The industry needs a standard that allows innovation to proceed at a rapid clip unfettered by any single company."

The first UALink products will launch "in the next couple of years," Norrod said.

Absent from the list of the group's members is Nvidia, which is by far the largest producer of AI accelerators with an estimated 80 percent to 95 percent of the market.

In Nvidia's most recent fiscal quarter, the company's data center sales, which include sales of its AI chips, rose more than 400 percent year over year.

The company is probably none too keen to support a spec based on rival technologies, according to a report by the TechCrunch.

In a recent report, Gartner estimates that the value of AI accelerators used in servers will total 21 billion U.S. dollars this year, increasing to 33 billion dollars by 2028.

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