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Comment by gosub100 | Hacker News Reader

Why do they still sell hardware now that practically every other business has moved to being a service provider? If we set aside the fact that it would be an awful move for end-users, what's to stop Nvidia from cornering the market by only renting them in their own data centers? Is it the logistics of moving the massive training sets?

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That would be a highly risky bet on Nvidia becoming AWS faster than AWS can become Nvidia.

What they're doing is instead trying to make sure that their GPUs continue to be seen as the best option in the short/medium term (by having them accessible everywhere), and trying to commoditize their complement by giving small cloud providers disproportionate GPU allocations, which they hope will drive customers from the big providers to the smaller ones that a) aren't trying to build their own ML hardware, b) will have less negotiating leverage with Nvidia in the long term.

Many of the largest HPC customers (read: DoD, DoE, NNSA) simply will not allow their code to sit on someone else's machine.

Semi industry players have a strong cultural memory that "competing with your own customers" is a bad plan.

I surmise that such a strategy would essentially hand their market share over to AMD on a silver platter.

What do you think all the other service providers are running their services on?

I'm asking why Nvidia doesn't maximize their profits by retaining the hardware and selling compute. They could capture the market from those other providers if they sold more FLOPS/kilowatt (or whatever metric is used). Compared to manufacturing GPUs/TPUs, running a datacenter (especially one that specializes in Nvidia hw) would seem to be a trivial task.

Google Cloud Platform hasn't managed to make much of a dent in AWS's business, despite being the only place you can get 'TPUs' and 'bigquery'.

Becoming a successful cloud provider is far from trivial, even if you can offer technology no-one else has.

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