My impression is that AMD has always had technically competitive products, but lagged in software and ecosystem and marketing. (It had a long line of dud CEOs.)

Lisa Su (Jensen's cousin, btw) seems to have turned the ship around.

I'd predict Amazon and MS. A huge portion of Nvidia's revenue is from data centers run by amazon/MS, and they both have at least some experience in designing their own chips (more on Amazon's end with Graviton). I'd expect that they are both motivated to try to design something in house that is more suited to their needs and cuts out the nvidia profit margin.

Yes, AMD (which has great GPUs, but sucks at software), Intel (that's improving rapidly on GPU side), and possibly Google with their Tensor. Also, AWS has their dedicated AI chips, aptly named Trainium and Inferentia.

Theoretically even Apple could start producing AI chips based on their Neural Engine.

The better NVIDIA's results are now the more that encourages the competitors to try and take some of the cake for themselves.

Yes.

And more you've heard about.

And yet more you haven't, since they're in stealth.

When margins are above 75% everyone and their mother wants a piece of the pie.

Model inference can be done with any GPU, AMD, Nvidia, Intel. Can even be done with CPU in many cases.

Training is largely done on Nvidia cards, but there's nothing mandating that.

Google trained Gemini on their own in-house TPUs, and according to their published stats it exceeds ChatGPTs performance.

There's a collective delusion right now that somehow CUDA entitles Nvidia to a forever monopoly on GPU compute. There's no way they will maintain ~90% gross margins on their hardware sales. It's far too economically inefficient for purchasers in the long run.

The ones who figure out how to use competitor cards at less than half the cost will have a huge advantage

Right now it's fevered money pouring into what they see as the fastest way to get their feet into the game. Nvidia will do well, but that's already more than priced in right now.