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Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

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Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#21

IIRC, Intel peaked at 98% of the Data Center CPU Market. AMD released an arguably superior CPU almost 7 years ago, but Intel still has 70%. You might be able to argue that MI300 is competitive, but it is certainly hard to argue it's superior, so we're not yet at the GPU equivalent of the 2017 release of EPYC.

Intel also charged a competitive price for CPUs, recent NVidia chips are charged at a premium rate not seen in semiconductor for decades. I'd venture the margin on an H100 @65k is probably ~98%. If the market for datacenter GPUs rises to ~30 million deployed GPUs and ~10 Million new chips per year... that would be 192 billion in profit/year.

I'd be skeptical that NVidia can maintain that margin, or price point. Had they owned ARM it may have been possible, as new entrants to the chip market could have been locked out.

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#22
post #9
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monopolies are not illegal per se. Misusing monopoly power is illegal. Nvidia has monopoly in the market, but unless they use their position illeagally, that's OK. GPU market is competitive and Nvidia has put in the work others like AMD or Intel never bothered to do.

This is it. Having a monopoly is OK. Being anticompetitive is when you run into trouble, even potentially without a monopoly.

Likely part of the move to merge their drivers into the linux kernel etc.

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#23

IIRC, Intel peaked at 98% of the Data Center CPU Market. AMD released an arguably superior CPU almost 7 years ago, but Intel still has 70%. You might be able to argue that MI300 is competitive, but it is certainly hard to argue it's superior, so we're not yet at the GPU equivalent of the 2017 release of EPYC.

Industry estimate is that Nvidia market share declines 75% in 2027-2028.

If the AI hype is real, then Nvidia revenue is $300 billion in 5 years. Assuming P/E 25 would mean $7.5 trillion valuation. That sounds insane.

If hype is 1/3 true, Nvidia grows 17% per year and is valued $2.5 trillion in five years.

ps. Intel vs. AMD is not completely symmetric competition because AMD is fabless and Intel is not. While AMD gets better margins, Intel can produce volumes to match demand. AMD competes directly with Apple, Nvidia, ARM,.. for TSMC fab capacity (I know Intel also buys manufacturing from TSMC).

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#24
On Dec 6th, AMD released the MI300x. This is effectively their entry into the AIA (ai accelerator is the new GPU) market. The previous generation (MI250) cards were good, but this new release leapfrogs everything. These cards offer 192gb of ram and pretty great performance. 8 cards in a chassis. Great for training and inference.

Sure, we all know that the AMD software needs work, but I think the long bet here is on Lisa. Reminds me of the Mac vs. Windows days. If NVIDIA owns this much of the market, then I'd want to work to decentralize my AI business off a single point of failure.

So, I've been working to launch a business to buy up as many of these chips as I can and make them available as bare metal rentals, even with IPMI access. This is something that hasn't been done before. Usually these sorts of AMD cards end up in super computers (ie: Frontier) and/or only accessible to a few people. Azure is catching on with their recent product, but that is a big cloud... I believe people will still want private clouds.

To start with, we're loading up the MI300x chassis with tons of RAM/nvme, top end AMD CPUs and dual 400G networking. We've also got top end management servers for Ray/k8s/slurm. We are interested in feedback on what people want and can be agile enough to customize our purchases for your needs.

My background is that I built a cluster of 150k AMD GPUs across 7 data centers. Deploying and running a lot of compute is something I've gotten very good at. Feel free to reach out.

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#25

AMD investors must be salivating at taking some of that market share

AMD should have laid the groundwork a decade ago, instead they basically gave up. Who needs GPGPU anyway, right?

> Who needs GPGPU anyway, right?

The world's largest computer, Frontier at oak ridge national laboratory, runs AMD GPUs. AMD is undisputably the #2 in the GPU space.

https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2023/11/

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#26

On Dec 6th, AMD released the MI300x. This is effectively their entry into the AIA (ai accelerator is the new GPU) market. The previous generation (MI250) cards were good, but this new release leapfrogs everything. These cards offer 192gb of ram and pretty great performance. 8 cards in a chassis. Great for training and inference. Sure, we all know that the AMD software needs work, but I think the long bet here is on L…

that's awesome! what support are you giving for the rewriting that has to happen for things to run on ROCm or whatever instead of CUDA?

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#28

On Dec 6th, AMD released the MI300x. This is effectively their entry into the AIA (ai accelerator is the new GPU) market. The previous generation (MI250) cards were good, but this new release leapfrogs everything. These cards offer 192gb of ram and pretty great performance. 8 cards in a chassis. Great for training and inference. Sure, we all know that the AMD software needs work, but I think the long bet here is on L…

that's awesome! what support are you giving for the rewriting that has to happen for things to run on ROCm or whatever instead of CUDA?

Thanks! Because we are just starting out, in order to stay lean, we are focused on the hardware side at this point. The capex/opex involved with deploying this level of compute is rather insane and I feel that it will be too distracting to solve both problems at the same time.

I do fully recognize that in order to build the developer flywheel, we need to solve both problems in the long run. For now, there are other great companies that are focused on solving the software side, such as NeuralFabric, EmbeddedLLM, Lamini and MK1. Our intention is to partner and be friends with all of them. There is a lot of room in the picks/shovels ecosystem for all of us.

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#29

IIRC, Intel peaked at 98% of the Data Center CPU Market. AMD released an arguably superior CPU almost 7 years ago, but Intel still has 70%. You might be able to argue that MI300 is competitive, but it is certainly hard to argue it's superior, so we're not yet at the GPU equivalent of the 2017 release of EPYC.

Intel never had a software moat. AMD has a terrible reputation for software that will be hard to shake.

Reputation is basically meaningless here. If they fix the software, people will figure that out in short order. They just have to actually do it.

Re: Analysts estimate Nvidia owns 98% of the data center GPU market

#30
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD should have laid the groundwork a decade ago, instead they basically gave up. Who needs GPGPU anyway, right?

> Who needs GPGPU anyway, right? The world's largest computer, Frontier at oak ridge national laboratory, runs AMD GPUs. AMD is undisputably the #2 in the GPU space. https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2023/11/

That is great, did someone ask the programmers about it though? Or did someone else see the higher FLOPs per dollar and bought in? If your job is literally programming a supercomputer and you can get AMD to fix stuff for you, maybe it aint so bad. That is not where most software comes from though.
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