IMHO the way NVidia is infiltrating academics and academia, is highly unethical.
In the past few years that has happened, as reflected on the stock price. Other players are basically a decade behind them and with all of the current hype and AI/ML workflows becoming mainstream, I think it is next to impossible for anyone to catch up.
I disagree. NVDA aren't in the position they are because they had to work 10 years to get there. They're in that position because it took the market that long to develop, and they were there the whole time.
But the main factor is demand. You can't rush that, no matter how early you start. And second mover advantage is a real thing. CUDA is a double edged sword. Everyone has an incentive to break NVDA's dominance, and ultimately their moat will become commoditized especially has dominant architectures like Transformers drive the vast majority of demand. People will simply optimize for that.
Can AMD catch up to them quickly on the training / R&D side? Doubtful.
Can AMD catch up or even surpass them on the inference side? Absolutely.
I don't think I've seen a single researcher get a free GPU since the V100 era. (DGX-1) system.
I don't see anything unethical about seeding universities (as an organization) with hardware tbh. That's just... grants. Even grants often come in the form of "we fund someone who's doing research on something that's related to us/using our hardware+software".