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If Nvidia were interested in "open" AI, they would spend time to collaborate with AMD, etc. to build an (updated) open alternative to CUDA. That's probably the

If Nvidia were interested in "open" AI, they would spend time to collaborate with AMD, etc. to build an (updated) open alternative to CUDA. That's probably the most closed part of the whole stack right now.

bongodongobob 1y ago
That's AMDs fault, not Nvidia's.
- hobofan 1y ago
  AMD is incompetent on the ecosystem layer, but Nvidia has certainly been acting malicious. I've laid out my thesis at length in past comments, which I don't care to repeat, but the gist is: During the ~2010-2014 period (the time where the ecosystem gap really widened), Nvidia purposfully didn't implement OpenCL 2.0 while pushing CUDA, which made cross-platform solutions uncompetitive.
kookamamie 1y ago
Indeed. This is throwing pennies in virtue-signaling openness.
sounds 1y ago
Nvidia is interested in commoditizing their complements. It's a business strategy to decrease the power of OpenAI (for instance). Nvidia dreams of a world where there are lots of "open" alternatives to OpenAI, like there are lots of open game engines and lots open software in general. All buying closed Nvidia chips.
- arthurcolle 1y ago
  Why is OpenAI a threat to Nvidia? They are still highly dependent on those GPUs
  - tomrod 1y ago
    Two concepts - Monopsony is the inverse of Monopoly -- one buyer. Walmart is often a monopsony for suppliers (exclusive or near exclusive). - Desire for vertical integration and value extraction, related to #1 but with some additional nuances
    - next_xibalba 1y ago
      Who is the one buyer in the Nvidia scenario? How would that benefit Nvidia?
      - KaoruAoiShiho 1y ago
        It would hurt nvidia not benefit, that's why nvidia spends a lot of effort to prevent that from happening, and it's not the case currently. They really need to avoid the situation in the console market, where the fact there's only 3 customers means almost no margins on console chips.
        next_xibalba 1y ago
        Prior to the A.I. boom, Nvidia had a much, much more diverse customer base in terms of revenue mix. According to their 2015 annual report[1], their revenues were spread across the following revenue segments: gaming, automotive, enterprise, HPC and cloud, and PC and mobile OEMs. Gaming was the largest segment and contributed less than 50% of revenues. At this time, with a diverse customer base, their gross margins were 55.5%. (This is a fantastic gross margin in any industry outside software). In 2025 (fiscal year), Nvidia only reported two revenue segments: compute and networking ($116B revenue) and graphics ($14.3B revenue). Within the compute and networking segment, three customers represented 34% of all revenue. Nvidia's gross margins for fiscal 2025 were 75% [2]. In other words, this hypothesis doesn't fit at all. In this case, having more concentration in extremely deep pocketed customers competing over a constrained supply of product has caused margins to sky rocket. Moreover, GP's claim of monopsony doesn't make any sense. Nvidia is not at any risk of having a single buyer, and with the recent news that sales to China will be allowed, the customer base is going to become more diverse, creating even more demand for their products. [1] https://s201.q4cdn.com/141608511/files/doc_financials/annual/2015/2015_NVDA_Annual_Report.pdf https://s201.q4cdn.com/141608511/files/doc_financials/annual... [2] https://s201.q4cdn.com/141608511/files/doc_financials/2025/annual/NVIDIA-2025-Annual-Report.pdf https://s201.q4cdn.com/141608511/files/doc_financials/2025/a...
- someone7x 1y ago
  > commoditizing their complements Feels like a modern euphemism for “subjugate their neighbors”.
  - jvanderbot 1y ago
    Business has always been a civilized version of war, and one which will always capture us in similar ways, so I guess wartime analogies are appropriate? Still it feels awful black and white to phrase it that way when this is a clear net good and better alignment of incentives than before.
  - skybrian 1y ago
    No, it’s encouraging competition and cost-cutting in a part of the market they don’t control. This can be a reason for companies to support open source, for example. Meanwhile, the companies running data centers will look for ways to support alternatives to Nvidia. That’s how they keep costs down. It’s a good way to play companies off each other, when it works.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- amelius 1y ago
  But AI depends on a small number of tensor operators, primitives which can be relatively easily implemented by competitors, so compute is very close to being a commodity when it comes to AI. A company like Cerebras (founded in 2015) proves that this is true. The moat is not in computer architecture. I'd say the real moat is in semiconductor fabrication.
  - sounds 1y ago
    Have you ever tried to run a model from huggingface on an AMD GPU? Semiconductor fabrication is a high risk business. Nvidia invested heavily in CUDA and out-competed AMD (and Intel). They are working hard to keep their edge in developer mindshare, while chasing hardware profits at the same time.
    - amelius 1y ago
      > Have you ever tried to run a model from huggingface on an AMD GPU? No, but seeing how easily they run on Apple hardware, I don't understand your point, to be honest.
    - phkahler 1y ago
      >> Have you ever tried to run a model from huggingface on an AMD GPU? Yes. I'd never touched any of that stuff and then one day decided to give it a shot. Some how-to told me how to run something on Linux which had a choice of a few different LLMs. I picked one of the small ones (under 10B) and had it running on my AMD APU inside of 15 minutes. The weights were IIRC downloaded from huggingface. The wrapper was not. Anyway, what's the problem? BTW that convinced me that small LLMs are basically worthless. IMA need to go bigger next time. BTW my "old" 5700G has 64GB of RAM, next build I'll go at least double that.
  - bilbo0s 1y ago
    which can be relatively easily implemented by competitors Oh my. Please people, try to think back to your engineering classes. Remember the project where you worked with a group to design a processor? I do. Worst semester of my life. (Screw whoever even came up with that damn real analysis math class.) And here's the kicker, I know I'll be dating myself here, but all I had to do for my part was tape it out. Still sucked. Not sure I'd call the necessary processor design work here "relatively easy"? Even for highly experienced, extremely bright people, this is not "relatively easy". Far more easy to make the software a commodity. Believe me.
- PeterStuer 1y ago
  I thought they assumed AI hardware would become commoditized sooner rather than later, and their play was to sell complete vertically integrated AI solution stacks, mainly a software and services play?
sim7c00 1y ago
you are not wrong. open up cuda would be a a real power move. i think ppl would mind a some of their other crap practices a lot less.
colechristensen 1y ago
They could also publish all of their source code, die designs, put their patents in the public domain and go live on a beach somewhere and fish for a living. CUDA is what they sell, it makes more sense for them to charge for hardware and give the hardware-locked software away for free.
latchkey 1y ago
Came here to say this. It is the basis for my entire business. It isn't just CUDA though, it is the hardware layer too. That is why we are exclusive to AMD AI hardware. We have dozens of companies building foundational models and they all target a single vendor to supply all the hardware? Make it make sense! Yes, I know models run on AMD too, but the fact is, Nvidia, who's clearly doing a great job, is a literal monopoly. We need viable alternatives. This deal was done with CirraScale, who are great people. It is important to point out that they are also one of the 13 official AMD Cloud Partners. I'm on the list too.
emsign 1y ago
That's because nvidia is in the business of selling chips and compute time. All they care bout is that as much people on Earth become dependend on AI running on nvidia hw as possible.

bongodongobob 1y ago

That's AMDs fault, not Nvidia's.

hobofan 1y ago
AMD is incompetent on the ecosystem layer, but Nvidia has certainly been acting malicious. I've laid out my thesis at length in past comments, which I don't care to repeat, but the gist is: During the ~2010-2014 period (the time where the ecosystem gap really widened), Nvidia purposfully didn't implement OpenCL 2.0 while pushing CUDA, which made cross-platform solutions uncompetitive.

kookamamie 1y ago

Indeed. This is throwing pennies in virtue-signaling openness.

sounds 1y ago

Nvidia is interested in commoditizing their complements. It's a business strategy to decrease the power of OpenAI (for instance). Nvidia dreams of a world where there are lots of "open" alternatives to OpenAI, like there are lots of open game engines and lots open software in general. All buying closed Nvidia chips.

arthurcolle 1y ago
Why is OpenAI a threat to Nvidia? They are still highly dependent on those GPUs
- tomrod 1y ago
  Two concepts - Monopsony is the inverse of Monopoly -- one buyer. Walmart is often a monopsony for suppliers (exclusive or near exclusive). - Desire for vertical integration and value extraction, related to #1 but with some additional nuances
  - next_xibalba 1y ago
    Who is the one buyer in the Nvidia scenario? How would that benefit Nvidia?
    - KaoruAoiShiho 1y ago
      It would hurt nvidia not benefit, that's why nvidia spends a lot of effort to prevent that from happening, and it's not the case currently. They really need to avoid the situation in the console market, where the fact there's only 3 customers means almost no margins on console chips.
      - next_xibalba 1y ago
        Prior to the A.I. boom, Nvidia had a much, much more diverse customer base in terms of revenue mix. According to their 2015 annual report[1], their revenues were spread across the following revenue segments: gaming, automotive, enterprise, HPC and cloud, and PC and mobile OEMs. Gaming was the largest segment and contributed less than 50% of revenues. At this time, with a diverse customer base, their gross margins were 55.5%. (This is a fantastic gross margin in any industry outside software). In 2025 (fiscal year), Nvidia only reported two revenue segments: compute and networking ($116B revenue) and graphics ($14.3B revenue). Within the compute and networking segment, three customers represented 34% of all revenue. Nvidia's gross margins for fiscal 2025 were 75% [2]. In other words, this hypothesis doesn't fit at all. In this case, having more concentration in extremely deep pocketed customers competing over a constrained supply of product has caused margins to sky rocket. Moreover, GP's claim of monopsony doesn't make any sense. Nvidia is not at any risk of having a single buyer, and with the recent news that sales to China will be allowed, the customer base is going to become more diverse, creating even more demand for their products. [1] https://s201.q4cdn.com/141608511/files/doc_financials/annual/2015/2015_NVDA_Annual_Report.pdf https://s201.q4cdn.com/141608511/files/doc_financials/annual... [2] https://s201.q4cdn.com/141608511/files/doc_financials/2025/annual/NVIDIA-2025-Annual-Report.pdf https://s201.q4cdn.com/141608511/files/doc_financials/2025/a...
someone7x 1y ago
> commoditizing their complements Feels like a modern euphemism for “subjugate their neighbors”.
- jvanderbot 1y ago
  Business has always been a civilized version of war, and one which will always capture us in similar ways, so I guess wartime analogies are appropriate? Still it feels awful black and white to phrase it that way when this is a clear net good and better alignment of incentives than before.
- skybrian 1y ago
  No, it’s encouraging competition and cost-cutting in a part of the market they don’t control. This can be a reason for companies to support open source, for example. Meanwhile, the companies running data centers will look for ways to support alternatives to Nvidia. That’s how they keep costs down. It’s a good way to play companies off each other, when it works.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
amelius 1y ago
But AI depends on a small number of tensor operators, primitives which can be relatively easily implemented by competitors, so compute is very close to being a commodity when it comes to AI. A company like Cerebras (founded in 2015) proves that this is true. The moat is not in computer architecture. I'd say the real moat is in semiconductor fabrication.
- sounds 1y ago
  Have you ever tried to run a model from huggingface on an AMD GPU? Semiconductor fabrication is a high risk business. Nvidia invested heavily in CUDA and out-competed AMD (and Intel). They are working hard to keep their edge in developer mindshare, while chasing hardware profits at the same time.
  - amelius 1y ago
    > Have you ever tried to run a model from huggingface on an AMD GPU? No, but seeing how easily they run on Apple hardware, I don't understand your point, to be honest.
  - phkahler 1y ago
    >> Have you ever tried to run a model from huggingface on an AMD GPU? Yes. I'd never touched any of that stuff and then one day decided to give it a shot. Some how-to told me how to run something on Linux which had a choice of a few different LLMs. I picked one of the small ones (under 10B) and had it running on my AMD APU inside of 15 minutes. The weights were IIRC downloaded from huggingface. The wrapper was not. Anyway, what's the problem? BTW that convinced me that small LLMs are basically worthless. IMA need to go bigger next time. BTW my "old" 5700G has 64GB of RAM, next build I'll go at least double that.
- bilbo0s 1y ago
  which can be relatively easily implemented by competitors Oh my. Please people, try to think back to your engineering classes. Remember the project where you worked with a group to design a processor? I do. Worst semester of my life. (Screw whoever even came up with that damn real analysis math class.) And here's the kicker, I know I'll be dating myself here, but all I had to do for my part was tape it out. Still sucked. Not sure I'd call the necessary processor design work here "relatively easy"? Even for highly experienced, extremely bright people, this is not "relatively easy". Far more easy to make the software a commodity. Believe me.
PeterStuer 1y ago
I thought they assumed AI hardware would become commoditized sooner rather than later, and their play was to sell complete vertically integrated AI solution stacks, mainly a software and services play?

sim7c00 1y ago

you are not wrong. open up cuda would be a a real power move. i think ppl would mind a some of their other crap practices a lot less.

colechristensen 1y ago

They could also publish all of their source code, die designs, put their patents in the public domain and go live on a beach somewhere and fish for a living. CUDA is what they sell, it makes more sense for them to charge for hardware and give the hardware-locked software away for free.

latchkey 1y ago

Came here to say this. It is the basis for my entire business. It isn't just CUDA though, it is the hardware layer too. That is why we are exclusive to AMD AI hardware. We have dozens of companies building foundational models and they all target a single vendor to supply all the hardware? Make it make sense! Yes, I know models run on AMD too, but the fact is, Nvidia, who's clearly doing a great job, is a literal monopoly. We need viable alternatives. This deal was done with CirraScale, who are great people. It is important to point out that they are also one of the 13 official AMD Cloud Partners. I'm on the list too.

emsign 1y ago

That's because nvidia is in the business of selling chips and compute time. All they care bout is that as much people on Earth become dependend on AI running on nvidia hw as possible.