The chipmaker — a leading manufacturer of the graphic processing units (GPUs) typically used in AI — closed above $2 trillion for the first time Friday, making it the third most valuable company on Wall Street, behind only Microsoft and Apple.
With the expansive “moat” Nvidia has secured through years of investment and the development of its own widely used software ecosystem, experts said it is unlikely competitors will be able to span the gap any time soon.
“I think it’s Nvidia’s game to lose, and they’re not showing any signs of losing it right now,” Stacy Rasgon, a senior analyst at Bernstein Research, told The Hill.
Nvidia has been developing GPUs for decades. The chips were primarily used for video games until a discovery a decade ago prompted the machine learning community to begin using GPUs, said Tianqi Chen, an assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon’s Machine Learning Department.
Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, who is known as one of the “godfathers” of AI, found that GPUs were more efficient at the kind of large-scale computing required for machine learning, leading to the start of a “deep learning revolution,” Chen said.
“The machine learning community started to embrace GPU computing,” Chen said. “As of today, right, almost all the AI models that run deep neural learning networks … a lot of them, even a majority, runs on GPU.”
Nvidia noticed this development and began creating libraries for machine learning within its software ecosystem, called CUDA, Rasgon said.
While Nvidia was focused on developing its AI capabilities, its primary competitor in the GPU market, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), fell on hard times.
“It’s only in recent years that AMD and even others have had the resources in place to start investing in data center and AI with GPUs,” Rasgon said. “But by then, Nvidia’s had like a 10-year lead.”
Read more in a full report at TheHill.com.
