The Sequence Opinion #900: Beyond the GPU: Is Google the Only Full-Stack Rival to NVIDIA?

A thesis about the biggest AI rivalry nobody is talking about.

The Sequence Opinion #900: Beyond the GPU: Is Google the Only Full-Stack Rival to NVIDIA?

TL;DR

  • Comparing AI companies by chip specs (FLOPS, memory) is incomplete.
  • NVIDIA's success is due to an industrial system that integrates silicon, interconnects, servers, compilers, frameworks, cloud operations, models, and applications.
  • Google is the closest full-stack strategic rival to NVIDIA.
  • Google is not a universal drop-in replacement for NVIDIA.
  • AWS and AMD also make strong claims, making the word "only" problematic when describing NVIDIA's rivals.