Nvidia is building an IP licensing empire on the back of NVLink

The proliferation of custom AI ASICs, or XPUs, from OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and others has led many to question Nvidia's grip on the market. After all, if everybody's building their own, who needs the GPUs the AI arms dealer has made its fortune on? But Nvidia isn't concerned in the least and has instead invited its …

[BoHu]

"the flexibility and the fungi-bility"

I love the smell of flexible fungi in the morning, at the gym, in a mycelium network of compute, oh the organic memory, so strong, vivid, pungent. It smells like ... AI footctory! ;)

[ITMA]

Re: "the flexibility and the fungi-bility"

What I (and probably others) want to know is this:

Are their "fungi", "magic fungi"?

Have NVIDIA been consuming too much of their own magic fungi?

:)

[Korev]

Re: "the flexibility and the fungi-bility"

That Jensen looks like a Fungi

[DS999]

Nvidia is selling everything they can make

And has more demand than they can satisfy for the foreseeable future.

So why would they worry about what others are doing today? Especially since most of them are focusing on inference or automation, not on training where Nvidia's GPUs are much harder to beat.

[Richard 12]

Re: Nvidia is selling everything they can make

On top of that, they know the bottom is going to fall out of the market pretty soon. No doubt they'll still be due their quarterly IP licence fees for a good while, even if nobody is selling any kit at all.

[rgjnk]

Oh look!

More circular deals bootstrapped by Nvidia financing.

That's a big pile of stuff to be floating on thin air.

Meanwhile they've pumped their margins so high that their products aren't affordable or profitable to their users.

It all looks a bit unsustainable from here.

[jlturriff]

So, looks like (if Nvidia refrains from gouging too much) the upside will be cross-vendor compatibility; the downside will be the monoculture (a la Big Ag) of bug propagation.

[Ozan]

3Dfx, gone but its ideas live on.