Habana Labs was supposed to challenge Nvidia. Instead, Intel drove it into the ground. In December 2020, Amazon announced with great fanfare that it would use Gaudi chips from the small Israeli startup Habana Labs to train its large language models (LLMs) in the cloud. Although generative AI was not yet a household term at the time, it was a major development in the ecosystem. Intel, which had acquired Habana for $2 billion the year before, boasted about the event, calling it “the first crack at...