Nvidia's advantage is shifting past the chip itself

Nvidia is no longer selling just GPUs. Its lead is moving into the stack around the silicon — CUDA, the software libraries, the data center software, and the partnerships that lock customers into its ecosystem. The company's advantage is becoming harder to copy because it's not just hardware anymore; it's the entire development environment that builders have spent years learning.

This matters because the people writing code for AI workloads — researchers, startups, enterprises — are already fluent in Nvidia's tools. Switching to AMD or Intel chips means rewriting that code, retraining models, and rebuilding pipelines. The switch cost is real and expensive. The result is a widening gap between the big players who can afford the switch and everyone else who can't.

Why this matters for us: For any of us building or running AI workloads, this means the cost of moving away from Nvidia keeps rising — and the people already inside the stack get richer while the rest of us keep paying the premium.