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Comment by oidar | Hacker News Reader

“Nvidia wins either way” assumes the game stays the same — but Google, Amazon, and Meta aren’t building custom silicon to beat Nvidia on price, they’re building it to never need Nvidia at all. The moat isn’t the chips, it’s CUDA lock-in, and every major player is racing to break it.

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I would argue it just means the game doesn't suddenly change all at once. If the game changes slowly, in the short term it'll be good for Nvidia. It will take quite a while for it to affect Nvidia.

Google, Amazon and Meta are to some extent solving the wrong problem, or not solving the whole problem. They're designing chips ... which they can't build because they don't have the infrastructure and don't have as long running contracts as Nvidia does. They can't match Nvidia even at 3nm, at 10nm ... Now, maybe they can go with Intel (though several have tried and given up), but ...

Nvidia GPUs are still at their core reliant on the PC architecture, Inferencing on Nvidia cores will soon be like encoding a h265 stream on CPU.

I expect custom built TPUs will have progressively more and more advanced hardware acceleration where legacy aspects of the CUDA architecture will eventually limit their innovation without architecture changes (pci-e, nvme bus, cpu interrupts, reliance on system ram for index tables, etc ..) which fill their moat and level the playing field for google/Amazon/eventually apple

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