alt Hacker NewsIt’s reasonable to argue that NVIDIA has a de facto monopoly in the field of GPU-accelerated compute, especially due to CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture). While not a legal monopoly in the strict antitrust sense (yet), in practice, NVIDIA's control over the GPU compute ecosystem — particularly in AI, HPC, and increasingly in professional content creation — is extraordinarily dominant.
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Strict antitrust sense don't look at actual monopoly to trigger, but just if you use your standing in the market to gain unjust advantages. Which does not require a monopoly situation but just a strong standing used wrong (like abusing vertical integration). So Standard Oil, to take a famous example, never had more than a 30% market share.
Breaking a monopoly can be a solution to that, however. But having a large part of a market by itself doesn't trigger anti trust legislation.
Thanks ChatGPT!
> NVIDIA's control over the GPU compute ecosystem — particularly in AI, HPC
The two largest supercomputers in the world are powered by AMD. I don't think it's accurate to say Nvidia has monopoly on HPC
Source: https://top500.org/lists/top500/2025/06/