Nvidia is the undisputed king of AI chips. But thanks to the AI it helped build, the champ could soon face growing competition. Modern AI runs on Nvidia designs, a dynamic that has propelled the company to a market cap of well over $4 trillion. Each new generation of Nvidia chip allows companies to train more powerful AI models using hundreds or thousands of processors networked together inside vast data centers. One reason for Nvidia’s success is that it provides software to help program each new generation of chip. That may soon not be such a differentiated skill. A startup called Wafer is training AI models to do one of the most difficult and important jobs in AI—optimizing code so that it runs as efficiently as possible on a particular silicon chip. Emilio Andere, cofounder and CEO of Wafer, says the company performs reinforcement learning on open source models to teach them to write kernel code, or software that interacts directly with hardware in an operating system. Andere says Wafer also adds “agentic harnesses” to …