Nvidia wants all ML/AI running on CUDA.

Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and those two other clowns LARPing as a cloud, give away cloud credits.

As a big player, you want startups on your "platform", using your tooling, speaking and coding in your vernacular, in your flavors of things and mindsets on ways of doing things.

The first sample is free. Feels great the first time around.

But migrating isn't trivial. Vendor lock-in. A few quarters later, the user is scraping for more. Some startups sought to be acquired to be able to continue to fund their AWS costs because they can't do their own IT.

Check out the licensing on CUDA code as it pertains to silicon, it's gnarly. Stallman would double plus disapprove that one!

How many ML teams do you know, sans the one legit DevOps guy, have a genuinely agile mindset (as programmers define it) to gracefully pivot to non-Nvidia silicon?

"Once a customer, always a customer", loosely something like that.

Did Nvidia manipulate its own market, going far beyond the vendor imperative to give out free samples of something designed holistically for vendor lock-in? Maybe it did. But on the surface, Nvidia is acting out the nature of a vendor. As more details come out, we'll learn how much of existing insidious (though not illegal) behavior and how much of alleged behavior was at play.