Nvidia is famous for building AI chips, but its most important construction is a business bulwark that keeps customers in and competitors out. This barrier is made as much of software as it is of silicon. Over the past two decades, Nvidia has created what is known in tech as a “walled garden,” not unlike the one created by Apple. While Apple’s ecosystem of software and services is aimed at consumers, Nvidia’s focus has long been the developers who build artificial-intelligence systems and other software with its chips. Nvidia’s walled garden explains why, despite competition from other chip makers and even tech giants like Google and Amazon, Nvidia is highly unlikely to lose meaningful AI market share in the next few years. It also explains why, in the longer term, the battle over territory Nvidia now dominates is likely to focus on the company’s coding prowess, not just its circuitry design—and why its rivals are racing to develop software that can circumvent Nvidia’s protective wall. The key to understanding Nvidia’s walled garden is a software platform called CUDA. When it launched in 2007, this platform was a solution to a problem no one had yet: how to run non-graphics software, such as encryption algorithms and cryptocurrency mining, using Nvidia’s specialized chips, which were designed for labor-intensive applications like 3-D graphics and videogames. CUDA enabled all kinds of other computing on those chips, known as graphics-processing units, or GPUs. Among the applications CUDA let Nvidia’s chips run was AI software, whose booming growth in recent years has made Nvidia one of the most valuable companies in the world. Also, and this is key, CUDA was just the beginning. Year after year, Nvidia responded to the needs of software developers by pumping out specialized libraries of code, allowing a huge array of tasks to be performed on its GPUs at speeds that were impossible with conventional, general-purpose processors like those made by Intel and AMD.
Full report : How relying on both hardware and software for artificial generative intelligence made Nvidia a top tier company like Apple.
