Biggest Bitcoin miner wants to conquer the AI market

QZ tells an interesting story about the history of Bitmain, one of the dominant forces in Bitcoin mining. Bitmain's mining pools account for 28.9 percent of the processing power on the Bitcoin network and the company is fully vertically integrated. It designs its own ASICs, assembles the machines, sells them to customers, operates mining farms for its own account, rents out systems to others on contract, and manages some of world's largest mining pools.

The Chinese startup now plans to conquer the AI market with a new deep learning chip called Sophon. The company will use the expertise it gained in designing Bitcoin ASICs to take on the Googles and NVIDIAs of the world.

Bitmain’s newest product, the Sophon, may or may not take over deep learning. But by giving it such a name Zhan and his Bitmain co-founder, Jihan Wu, have signaled to the world their intentions. The Sophon unit will include Bitmain’s first piece of bespoke silicon for a revolutionary AI technology. If things go to plan, thousands of Bitmain Sophon units soon could be training neural networks in vast data centers around the world.

Full details over here.