Marketplace Morning reports new Skin in the Game series explores what we can learn about

money and careers from the $300 billion video game industry. Plus, here how an Oakland-based

program helps young people get the skills they need to break into this booming industry.

Listen to Skin in the Game and more from the Marketplace Morning report wherever you get your

podcasts. All right, the pandemic chip shortage has eased now for the AI chip shortage.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Karino.

Artificial intelligence is booming. Tools like chat GPT are getting more powerful and capable

at an impressive rate as companies race to plug these tools in to more and more parts of the

economy. But the burgeoning demand for AI computing power faces a big constraint. Or should I say

a micro constraint? The graphics processing units or GPUs needed to train and deploy these models

are specialized, costly, and almost entirely made by one company in Vidia at one manufacturer

in Taiwan, says Chris Miller. He's a professor of history at Tufts University, an author of

Chip War, the fight for the world's most critical technology. The chip industry overall is facing

a slowdown as the economy slows. People are buying fewer smartphones. Companies are spending less

money updating their data centers. But for the specific types of chips that are used for AI,

there's actually a boom and some shortages that are already becoming visible. And it seems like

the demand for these types of chips is only set to grow. And what about the risk as we have seen in

many other cases of technology of having the supply chain for this be so concentrated?

Well, it certainly is a risk, but there aren't that many other options for most firms in the short

run. The number of designers and producers of GPUs is quite limited. And not all GPUs are the same.

They have different technical specifications. And so if you're used to using one type, it's not

necessarily very easy to switch to a different type. What about the Chips Act and these

...