IBM is hoping to take advantage of the boom in generative AI technologies that can write human-like text more than a decade after Watson, its first major AI system, failed to gain market traction. One of the barriers the old Watson system faced was high costs, which IBM is hoping to address this time. Khare said using its own chips could lower cloud service costs because they are very power efficient. IBM has joined other tech giants such as Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) Google and Amazon.com (AMZN.O) in designing its own AI chips. Instead, IBM's chip aims to be cost-efficient at what AI industry insiders call inference, which is the process of putting an already trained AI system to use making real-world decisions.

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Persons: Mukesh Khare, Watson, Khare, Stephen Nellis, Jamie Freed Organizations: FRANCISCO, Business Machines, IBM, Reuters, IBM Semiconductors, Artificial Intelligence, Samsung Electronics, Google, Nvidia, Thomson Locations: San Francisco, watsonx