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Nvidia's biggest advantage in AI has never been only their hardware performance but how entrenched their software is in ML research that flowed down stream. However, if you've actually used CUDA C/C++, it's pretty one of the worst software development ecosystem imaginable: you get all the footgun of regular C++, plus GPU compute pretending to be C++ and but doesn't actually behave like C++ because CPU and GPU compute are fundamentally different, and the only reason people put up with it is because Vulkan and HIP C/C++ are even worse.
Google's limitation is that they still don't offer TPUs in a PCI-E card/dev board that people can plug in to their PC for local development and sane low level API to develop against, instead you have to go through their cloud and their full software stack which greatly limits ecosystem growth. The minute that Google figures that out, that's when Nvidia's dominance would be challenged.
The CUDA runtime coming with a gazillion reasonably decent kernels (DNN, BLAS, CUTLASS) and a concurrency system (NCCL) is a big deal; especially in the “early days” very few researchers or development runtimes were even writing their own kernels or dealing with CUDA C++ extensively, they were wrapping the ones NVidia gave them.
I do agree that it’s really not great, and I also have never been a strong believer in the CUDA moat overall; as the need for GPUs moves from research to production (inference), companies are plenty willing to build software from scratch anyway (and we see this with AMD GPUs being in plenty high demand in the datacenter and enthusiast market now).
That's really interesting. I have no experience writing anything that involves GPUs/TPUs, but over the years I've consistently read that CUDA is the "real moat" of Nvidia, which I never totally believed, but the way you describe makes it seem like it's not actually a moat in the slightest. It just happens to be an ecosystem associated with hardware that is not only considered the gold standard but happens to be more open than potential competition. Could it be that Nvidia has been on top because none of the competition has actually tried kicking them where it hurts?
The biggest advantage of tpus is the high bandwidth fiber optic interconnect between them that allows distributed computing on pods with thousands of tpus and the co-design of cooling systems that go with their racks. I do not think that we will see personal tpus any time soon.
Genuine question. Given that LLMs are supposed to allow us to rewrite anything, and I am an LLM believer, what I don't understand is: how does CUDA continue to be a moat in a world where LLMs can rewrite entire software development stacks? If NVIDIA is right about AI, isn't this same technology going to erode the software side of this same software moat?
Now with LLMs why a programming framework is a moat?
I had a hard time understanding why didn’t AMD make a better developer experience for this two years ago, and am now even more baffled that even with all the LLMs they still don’t seem to have moved a single inch, despite this probably being a tens of billions dollars worth feature.
I’m not entirely sure if local development will lead to Nvidia’s supremacy being challenged.
I think a simple reason why it’s been hard to unseat in Nvidia is first mover advantage. A lot more water has flown through Nvidia pipes than TPUs or AMDs chips for that matter.
TPUs and AMD chips aren’t priced cheaper than NVIDIA (at least for my purposes training models). So there hasn’t been an impetus for me to venture there and use those chips.
Anecdotally, folks I know who have tried using TPUs and AMD chips have hit more issues with the underlying drivers than with NVIDIA chips. That costs time and money to fix.
Eventually the other chips will go through enough iterations and stability will be reached
Interesting take on Google's TPUs. What I've previously heard (and still believe) is that Google's decision to only rent out, never sell, their TPUs is a deliberate and savvy strategy for bolstering GCP, which will work provided that TPUs are able to actually compete with other hardware (in practice meaning Nvidia). A few months ago there was some discussion on HN comparing them, and I think the verdict at the time was that their latest-gen TPUs win on compute-per-Joule for LLM-type workloads by quite a margin, which I think is huge for those who want to run LLMs at scale.
Are the switching costs of CUDA ecosystem potentially threatened because LLMs are now quite good at transcoding into other languages? In other words, is Nvidia's greatest strength (AI) also potentially its undoing?
> Google's limitation is that they still don't offer TPUs in a PCI-E card/dev board that people can plug in to their PC for local development
I’m not familiar with this field, but to my brain, https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Google+Coral seem to show me several such options.
> Google's limitation is that they still don't offer TPUs in a PCI-E card/dev board
Nvidia's sells hardware yet their market cap is about the same as Google's.
How much value could Google get by selling hardware too? Google'd be selling to competitors, so difficult to capture much of the value and would decrease Google's value as an AI company. Maybe a child company?
I mean they had/have the Coral but that's in an entirely different market segment
In many investment theses - like Nvidia's bet that demand for compute will keep growing - the first order assumption is usually correct. Yes, demand for more compute, chips, infrastructure is huge and each year some additional data centers will be built. Where such investment bets usually fail is in the second-order assumptions: Ie. the expectation of the growth of demand. This is where there's a high chance that the current expectations are likely exaggerated. So: demand is likely to persist for the foreseeable future but not increase every year. And that can upend the whole investment story. That can be enough to make these bonds a huge burden for Nvidia in the end. Not because people stopped buying more compute but because they stopped buying more every year.
What makes this insanely hard to predict is that the compute needed for the same quality output has roughly gone down 90% every 18 months for ~5 years.
1) We don't know how long that trend will continue, but you do know where to look for when it may end (if smaller sized models continue to compress the knowledge effectively of larger models).
2) We don't know when the appetite for higher cost models might go down and by how much if smaller models get "good enough" and price becomes far more important.
It is entirely possible that 5 years from now, there's >100x LLM inference going on - but demand for AI chips (including memory) is only 2x or less.
It is also entirely possible that at some size - LLMs pick up some emergent capability that doesn't scale well to smaller sizes - and that there's an incredible boost to demand to get that capability.
It's just very hard to predict.
Each of the hyperscalers has put like 250B each in the last year for infra. That means that they need to be writing AI profits to the tune of 20B per year just to keep up with the cost of the cash they burned.
We are not there. But they better figure it out soon. The cash flows dried up, and everyone is taking debt to support the capex. Google for the first time in its public history is cash flow negative. Amazon too.
Plus on top of that 1st and 2nd order can be correct, but then the price is too high, meaning people lose money even if correct about the future, but over pay for it.
They also have to be feeling the heat of the ASIC vendors. AMD just acquired Taalas and they work with Cerebras all the time on special projects. ASICs outgun nVidia's chips by an order of magnitude.
More interesting take on Nvidia's position than I've come across before. One thing to be noted is 1) Nvidia is already making moves in robotics so even if their position in AI (moreso llms) diminished, they certainly have another big avenue arguably harder to just get into (although I'm not sure what efforts Google is doing for the tpu in robotics). Another point is Nvidia is still the main player in the west, that is, China certainly can and will create their own full stack without reliance on US companies. That puts Europe and other countries in an interesting, do you buy Nvidia because it's the only option or for security. That's to say I believe Nvidia's position relied on many different things being true at the same time, and we're moving towards an environment where those things are certainly being contested at (roughly) the same time.
I'm just hoping that some day they can get back into the relatively small market of gaming gpus, even if for just nostalgia sake.
Even in the west, Nvidia's dominance is bound to weaken. There is a notable uptick of articles on HN about people running large models on AMD hardware. And while I don't know official sales figures, I know we have trouble getting our AMD system delivered
AMD's software story is still a lot worse than Nvidia's. But patching up vllm to run one or two models you care about on AMD hardware is a much easier proposition than using them in most other fields of AI.
Google has their robotics models, for example:
https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-robotics/
Google is mostly the party behind the whole VLA principle.
For awhile I've found two things hard to square, that the hardware and software making up current gen AI will bring us to a socioeconomic singularity, and the reality the thing they're mostly trying to emulate is a few pounds of meat and fat running on tens of watts equivalent. On one hand the current AIs are obviously super human in some tasks, get completely dunked on in others by far simpler organisms. My cat can catch a bug out of the air, Fable 5 in Cowork can lack the dexterity to make a slideshow because I had LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office. Not even close to analogous, but point being they appear to have pretty fundamental differences in how they can interface with the world that the economic thesis seems to gloss over.
Another interesting discrepancy is that people think current GPUs are maybe capable of running AGI but they still can barely manage photorealistic rendering of a single room in realtime, or simulate something like a shirt thrown into a pile of laundry. They can generate a video of it based on millions of existing videos, but not do a real simulation of light and physics in realtime.
You make a good point. Maybe the AI apocalypse will actually be when someone hooks up a cat brain to a super advanced AI.
> a few pounds of … running on tens of watts equivalent.
Aren’t you already describing a laptop computer? Add a local LLM and you’re fully there
Nvidia has been playing a dangerous but profitable game since the Crypto boom.
but now I think they probably have bitten more than they can chew.
Apple already proved with their unified memory - that as long you have the capacity you can run capable models locally - thereby goes demand for inference if everyone is running some model locally.
For training - Chinese models have proved that you don't need the latest & greatest in Nvidia hardware. Same as TPUs.
only time will tell.
It seems they had a head start but are now facing stiff competition on all fronts. Software moat, GPU's for gaming, and its distant cousin datacenter compute. They rightfully invested their insane profits into many ventures, and how many of those have turned around into profit?
They are also a robotics AI company with Omniverse. They are also an AI company with Nemotron. They are also a bleeding edge network equipment company after the Mellanox aquisition.
They stand to make a lot of money if they succeed in every venture. Good for Jensen taking risks and driving innovation, I hope they succeed in chewing even 50% of what they bit off.
Nvidia sell iot boards with unified architecture. Would not be shocked if they launch pc/laptop/server boards at some point.
What's the danger? They slide back down to being just a gaming graphics card company with a $10 share price?
IMO focusing on the hyperscalers is kind of misleading.
Yes, for programmers and tech companies AI is kinda boring now, but AI integration in general is still kind of uncharted territory.
There are so many small companies and individuals just getting started with AI today and I believe a large the customer base (and revenue) is still untapped. Hell, I’m discovering new use cases regularly still and the average mismanaged 30 people whatever SaaS vendor probably didn’t even get started yet.
Back in during the dotcom boom, there were multiple examples of companies being bought for ridiculous amounts. Often as the result of a bidding war.
Even back then, some economists used the "hidden wallet auction" as an example of how this could happen.
To summarize:
- there is a wallet
- you don't know how much is in the wallet
- you bid on amount to buy the wallet
- if you get the highest bid you win
- crucially, if you lose then you still have to pay
This is often cited as a game that you do not want to play b/c it's a. hard to predict the upside, b. the downside is huge.
That being said, people still got into these auctions and because of sunk cost fallacy, decided to keep bidding even if they might lose.
The hyperscaler race feels a bit like the above but no one seems to ant to admit it.
I see we have reached the stock market phase of Universal Paperclips.
I wonder why Google doesn't create an open-source CUDA alternative. Google released Kubernetes to stay relevant/competitive in the cloud wars, they were a distant third. They now have an opportunity to create an open source industry standard.
Or the companies spending trillions of dollars can do a Manhattan Project (Or X-Prize) and let a thousand startups work on it. One will succeed. Between Google, Amazon, FB, Microsoft, Apple, AMD, Qualcomm, Intel (and dozens of other companies) there is enough economic incentive to do it. Also, isn't this what AI is supposed to be extremely good at, CUDA experts can continue to write CUDA (without having to learn anything new), a translation layer will rewrite it. If software can be one-shot from markdown files, this can't be impossible.
Tend to agree with Ben's thesis RE Demis and DeepMind not really being focused on the agentic coding race. That being said, it remains to be seen whether Sergey and Koray can inspire the foot soldiers in the same way that Sama and Dario do. I'm not too optimistic, and that's to say nothing of the fact that Google cannot possibly hope to compete with these other companies on potential employee upside.
Laughable to cite and reiterate the idea that Google is cooked where it comes to SoTA and AI in general when they operate, reliably and successfully for decades, one of the largest computing infrastructures on Earth and will likely continue to usefully serve the 90% of AI requests that don’t involve managing large codebases. Also seems strange to suggest that Google would need to Aquihire a company like Thinking Machines when it could spin up their AI model in a couple of weeks on its own TPUs if it felt like it. Demis likely wants to focus on his specific interest at the junction of biochemistry, neurobiology and computation which is more specific and unique to Demis than building a general purpose Q&A search model.
> The subsequent bankruptcy of Jay Cooke & Company triggered the Panic of 1873, culminating in endless railroad bankruptcies across the country, a multi-year depression, multi-decade deflation, and, one could argue, the financial conditions that made Europe, four decades later, into a tinder box.
American history education needs some dire reform.
> After the departure of DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis (technically promoted to chairman, but no longer in charge of day-to-day operations) and Gemini co-lead and former Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, along with a host of other prominent researchers, SemiAnalysis declared that Gemini is Cooked: "For all intents and purposes, we believe DeepMind is no longer a frontier lab"
Counterpoint: xAI pooped out a frontier model based on nothing but capital and one man's desire to push a right-wing political narrative. Google has the talent, and the money, and the experience, they just need some leadership.
> To translate such figures into comparable 2026 magnitudes, multiply by a factor of 1,200.
Perhaps this has something to do with the economic dislocations and world wars between the 1870s and today?
There's another factor which Ben failed to consider. Which is that NVIDIA doesn't need to rely on demand for their proprietary CUDA stack or their GPUs growing -- they are already selling directly to the consumer, and likely capturing much higher margins. They are moving up stack, not down, where demand for raw compute matters less. With the DGX Spark and Jensen’s statement about “open models”, their next product is likely a strong hint: consumer devices to fulfill the Mac Mini demand craze. They are probably going to start burning LLMs durectly onto sillicon and then selling DeepSeek-in-your-home to individual developers. I bet that would sell even better than Anthropic Max coding plans and is not dependent on hyperscaler funded boom-bust cycles. So Ben’s analysis highlights the risk of their existing business not growing but they are likely planning new businesses.
Nothing goes up and to the right forever. Nothing.
Building a business model on the belief that “this time is different” always finds storms on the horizon.
People and pundits have been dooming and bearing on Nvidia for as long as it's been around. It increased in intensity when gpus were used for large scale crypto mining and it became material to their operations, and continued as AI ("the bubble") started to really take off.
Over those years, my NVDA stock has been by far my biggest winner. I'm now up more than 1500% on it.
Let the dooming continue
This is fine. everything is on fire it’s not a bubble. ;-)
Is this just an ad for a new book about trains?
Disappointed by the lack of Tom Cruise.
Ben is wrong; demand for compute, aka revenue backlogs, is mythical and will collapse, simply because of two reasons :
1. Circular investment/spending.
2. Too much capital in the system, so returns cannot be hit regardless because the barrier is too high. (Evidence being every capital cycle in history)
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Ever free newsletter and talking head spouts narratives like this free. If you want something that quantifies and gives actionable information, you must do it yourself or pay for it. What are your below $2000/month sources for good analysis?
so short them. if you think that the demand for skilled-labor-substitutive capital is saturable in the medium term or that improvements at the model level eat those at the hardware/cuda level or that nvidia just has the timing wrong, short them.