alt Hacker NewsDoesn't even necessarily need to be CUDA compatible... there's OpenCL and Vulkan as well, and likely China will throw enough resources at the problem to bring various libraries into closer alignment to ease of use/development.
I do think China is still 3-5 years from being really competitive, but still even if they hit 40-50% of NVidia, depending on pricing and energy costs, it could still make significant inroads with legal pressure/bans, etc.
> there's OpenCL and Vulkan as well
OpenCL is chronically undermaintained & undersupported, and Vulkan only covers a small subset of what CUDA does so far. Neither has the full support of the tech industry (though both are supported by Nvidia, ironically).
It feels like nobody in the industry wants to beat Nvidia badly enough, yet. Apple and AMD are trying to supplement raster hardware with inference silicon; both of them are afraid to implement a holistic compute architecture a-la CUDA. Intel is reinventing the wheel with OneAPI, Microsoft is doing the same with ONNX, Google ships generic software and withholds their bespoke hardware, and Meta is asleep at the wheel. All of them hate each other, none of them trust Khronos anymore, and the value of a CUDA replacement has ballooned to the point that greed might be their only motivator.
I've wanted a proper, industry-spanning CUDA competitor since high school. I'm beginning to realize it probably won't happen within my lifetime.