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Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

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Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#3
post #2

How are these companies even getting these GPUs? I would imagine NVIDIA would give them all to Microsoft and Google if they are in short supply.

Nvidia needs these alt cloud so when big co builds their own GPUs they have them to suck up supply. If they are all dead, Nvidia may have no back path

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#4
post #2

How are these companies even getting these GPUs? I would imagine NVIDIA would give them all to Microsoft and Google if they are in short supply.

Why couldnt NVIDIA auction some to get best price?

I mean locking customers long term is probably better, but a certain % of product still vould be sold for a spot price? This made me wonder what is the optimum split on that - obviously depends on your market placement, but isnt nvidia basically a monopoly now?

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#7
post #2

How are these companies even getting these GPUs? I would imagine NVIDIA would give them all to Microsoft and Google if they are in short supply.

I think one of Jensen Huang's big interests is to enable a diverse number of markets that can utilize the technology in a short feedback loop. I don't believe that can be achieved if all of the hardware goes to Microsoft/Google.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#8
post #6

Isn't the mid/late game of all of these alternative clouds going to be the same as the big cloud players...get customer lock in and then prices slowly creep up until its kind of a wash?

> Isn't the mid/late game of all of these alternative clouds going to be the same as the big cloud players...get customer lock in and then prices slowly creep up until its kind of a wash?

That might be the plan, but I doubt it's going to work for GPUs like it did for AWS.

There's no moat here, other than the hardware. There's no value-add that the provider can add for free and lock you in.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#9
post #6

Isn't the mid/late game of all of these alternative clouds going to be the same as the big cloud players...get customer lock in and then prices slowly creep up until its kind of a wash?

That doesn't seem to be the case for long-tail VPS providers.

It doesn't seem to really be the case for the big cloud providers, either, as most of what they offer is fairly commoditized -- I've been using GCP for years to host Kubernetes clusters, Postgres databases, Redis instances, standard Linux VMs, etc., and while there'd be a cost associated with migrating out of GCP, I don't feel locked into it in any way, as the tools I'm using there are the same tools I'd be using regardless of where they were hosted.

The market for IaaS and for SaaS are very different from each other, and the walled-garden approach doesn't seem to have significant traction in the IaaS world, thankfully.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#10
post #2

How are these companies even getting these GPUs? I would imagine NVIDIA would give them all to Microsoft and Google if they are in short supply.

It’s better to have a diversified customer-base rather than being completely beholden to a small number of big customers that might decide they don’t need you down the line.
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