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nvidia is a $1.2 trillion dollar company (the 6th largest company by cap), and at this point AI is a huge component of that wealth. It has appreciated by 3.3x s

nvidia is a $1.2 trillion dollar company (the 6th largest company by cap), and at this point AI is a huge component of that wealth. It has appreciated by 3.3x since just the beginning of this year. If any of these companies truly made competitive silicon they absolutely would commercialize it. I suspect they aren't as competitive as the press releases hold them to be, and this Microsoft entrant is likely to follow the same path. Like Google, Tesla, Amazon and others it seems mostly an initiative to negotiate discounts from nvidia. It would be great if there were really competition. When Google was hyped about their Tensor chips they did have a period where they were looking to commercialize it, and there are some pretty crappy USB products they sell.

jsnell 3y ago
They are commercializing the silicon, by selling access to it on their clouds. Now, I know that what you actually mean is selling the chips themselves to third parties :) But it's not obvious that there's any point to it given their already existing model of commercializing the chips. First, literally everyone is already supply-constrained due to limits on high end foundry capacity. Nvidia has a ton of capacity because they're one of TSMC's top two customers. The big tech companies will have much smaller allocations which are used up just supplying their own clouds. Even if the demand for buying these chips rather than renting were there, they just don't have the chips to sell without losing out on the customers who want to rent capacity. Second, the chips by themselves are probably not all that useful. A lot of the benefit is coming from the silicon/system/software co-design. (E.g. the TPUv4 papers spent as much attention on the optical interconnect as the chips). Selling just chips or accelerator cards wouldn't do much good to any customers. Nor can they just trust that systems integrators could buy the cards and build good systems to house them in. They need to sell and support massive large scale custom systems to third parties. That's not a core competency for any of them, it'll take years to build up that org if you start now. And it means they need to ship the software to the customers, it can't continue being the secret sauce any more. Nvidia on the other hand has been building up an ecosystem and organization for exactly this for the last decade.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  > Nvidia has a ton of capacity because they're one of TSMC's top two customers. The big tech companies will have much smaller allocations which are used up just supplying their own clouds. And TSMCs top customer is not even playing in the cloud space.

jsnell 3y ago

They are commercializing the silicon, by selling access to it on their clouds. Now, I know that what you actually mean is selling the chips themselves to third parties :) But it's not obvious that there's any point to it given their already existing model of commercializing the chips. First, literally everyone is already supply-constrained due to limits on high end foundry capacity. Nvidia has a ton of capacity because they're one of TSMC's top two customers. The big tech companies will have much smaller allocations which are used up just supplying their own clouds. Even if the demand for buying these chips rather than renting were there, they just don't have the chips to sell without losing out on the customers who want to rent capacity. Second, the chips by themselves are probably not all that useful. A lot of the benefit is coming from the silicon/system/software co-design. (E.g. the TPUv4 papers spent as much attention on the optical interconnect as the chips). Selling just chips or accelerator cards wouldn't do much good to any customers. Nor can they just trust that systems integrators could buy the cards and build good systems to house them in. They need to sell and support massive large scale custom systems to third parties. That's not a core competency for any of them, it'll take years to build up that org if you start now. And it means they need to ship the software to the customers, it can't continue being the secret sauce any more. Nvidia on the other hand has been building up an ecosystem and organization for exactly this for the last decade.

scarface_74 3y ago
> Nvidia has a ton of capacity because they're one of TSMC's top two customers. The big tech companies will have much smaller allocations which are used up just supplying their own clouds. And TSMCs top customer is not even playing in the cloud space.