The computers in modern data centers — the engine rooms of the digital economy — are powered mainly by Intel chips. They animate the computing clouds of the internet giants and corporate data centers worldwide.

But Intel is now facing new competitive forces that could pose a challenge to its data-center dominance and profitability.

In particular, the rise of artificial intelligence is creating demand for new computing hardware tailored to handle vast amounts of unruly data and complex machine-learning software — and Intel’s general-purpose chips are not yet tuned for the most demanding tasks. Instead, specialized chips are delivering better performance on artificial intelligence programs that identify images, recognize speech and translate languages.

Intel is hurrying to catch the A.I. wave. On Tuesday, to deal with the changing competitive landscape, the Silicon Valley giant is presenting its newest data-center strategy at an event in New York, addressing its A.I. plans and its mainstream data-center business. The company has billed the event as its “biggest data-center launch in a decade.”