[bleepblap]

> AI compute hardware is not a commodity. And in a shortage, commodities can command high margins.

I don't see the distinction you're drawing about "commodity", but I'm happy to be wrong on that. My point was that spaceX's ai division is buying all their inputs from external vendors and can't meaningfully differentiate themselves from person Y who buys all the same hardware except for the fact they bought them first. Which...

> Correct. But charging people now generates incumbency advantages

I don't see now this is an "incumbency advantage". There's nothing that sticks their clients to stay there and sign up for the next data center.

[JumpCrisscross]

> don't see the distinction you're drawing about "commodity"

People pay markedly more for NVIDIA GPUs than they do for others. That opposes the fungibility requirement of a commodity.

[bleepblap]

In the west, there's no actual competitor to NVIDIA hardware. Yes, people make other chips, but nothing is a serious drop-in replacement for the nv stack. Between the networking and software, they're truly a different "thing" of accelerator, and I don't consider them fungible at all. The US government tried to build 3 supercomputers with each of nvidia/amd/intel accelerators and you can see how it went

[HarHarVeryFunny]

Well, in a largely token-based AI market it doesn't matter what hardware you use to generate those tokens - Google use TPUs, Amazon/Anthropic use Trainium, Musk is apparently contracting with Samsung to have his own chips built...

I expect that Google are renting SpaceX NVIDIA GPUs so they can resell to corporate GCP customers at higher rates, but if the AI growth story remains intact then I would expect the GPU-agnostic token demand to be much higher than the NVIDIA-specific rental demand.

[JumpCrisscross]

> there's no actual competitor to NVIDIA hardware...I don't consider them fungible at all

Which is why nobody should claim NVIDIA makes a commodity.