Dylan Patel (SemiAnalysis) explains to Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner why NVIDIA's software moat is weaker in AI inference compared to training.
Opinion
Patel: Every semiconductor company except NVIDIA is terrible at software
“I would say every semiconductor company in the world sucks at software except for NVIDIA, right?”
Opinion
Patel: AMD lacks software talent and refuses to fund internal GPU clusters
“AMD is really good, but they're missing software. AMD has no clue how to do software, I think. They've got very few developers on it. They won't spend the money to build a GPU cluster for themselves so that they can develop software.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Patel: Initial NVIDIA GPU cloud deployments suffer a 5% failure rate
“Google's brought in a level of reliability that NVIDIA GPUs don't have. You know, the dirty secret is to go ask people what the reliability rate of GPUs is in the cloud or in a deployment. It's like, oh God, it is not, they're reliable-ish, like, but like, esp…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Patel: Meta and Microsoft may take free cash flows close to zero
“I think Meta and Microsoft may even take their free cash flows close to zero and just spent.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Patel: NVIDIA's Jensen Huang only plans 12 to 18 months ahead
“Well, the funny thing is a lot of people at NVIDIA will say Jensen doesn't plan more than a year or year and a half out. Because they change things and they'll deploy them out that fast, right? No semi, every other semiconductor company takes years to deploy, …”
Assertion Partly supported
Patel: NVIDIA is cutting Blackwell margins to compete with custom ASICs
“Like with Blackwell, not only is it way, way, way faster, anywhere from 10 to 15 times on really large models for inference, because they've optimized it for very large language models, they've also decided, hey, we're gonna cut our margin, too, somewhat, beca…”