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mrlongrootsyesterday at 6:19 PM0 repliesview on HN

Hyperscalers do not need to achieve parity with Nvidia. There's a (let's say) 50% headroom in terms of profit margins, and plenty of headroom in terms of the complexity custom chip efforts need to implement: they don't need the complexity or generality of Nvidia's chips. If a simple architecture allows them to do inference at 50% of the TCO and 1/5th the complexity and reduce their Nvidia bill by 70% that's a solid win. I'm being fast and loose with numbers and Trainium clearly seems to have ambitions beyond inference, but given the hundreds of billions each cloud vendor is investing in the AI buildout, a couple billion on IP that you will own afterwards is a no brainer. Nvidia has good products and a solid head start but they're not unassailable or anything.