[kombine]

Because entry level researchers shape the industry in the long term. I'm in academia, I worked at two universities and I have not seen a lab that uses non-NVIDIA hardware for research. Majority of graduates go to work in the industry.

[hedgehog]

I used to believe this idea that the tools in academia would carry over to industry. Now I think it's only weakly true, that is there's not really a big barrier to switching to other options like TPU or maybe Trainium (haven't tried it). Supporting independent researchers gives you the Heroku problem, they may like your product but as they get more sophisticated and go to production they'll accept significant pain to save money, scale better, etc. You basically have to re-win that business from scratch and the technical tradeoffs are very different at that point.