Comment by nine_k
1 year ago
Do you think that NVidia is happy to not have an online ecosystem to tie to its GPUs, for added (sales) value? They are more than happy to entangle the GPUs with their proprietary CUDA language.
For a large, established, quasi-monopoly company it's always more attractive to keep things inside their walled gardens. Suggesting that Google should start supporting TPUs outside Google Cloud is like suggesting that Apple should start supporting iOS on non-Apple hardware.
> Do you think that NVidia is happy to not have an online ecosystem to tie to its GPUs, for added (sales) value?
I think nvidia is ecstatic about having commoditised their complement, and having the only ML acceleration option that's available from every cloud provider and on-prem.
Why have Amazon, Google and Microsoft as competitors when you can have them as customers instead?
This is indeed so. But if NVidia could have some recurring revenue from the GPUs, maybe in the form of leasing GPU farms it runs in a proprietary way, it would also be nice. In that alternative universe, it would still have Google and MS as customers, the way AWS has many large-scale companies as customers.