CUDA Proves Nvidia Is a Software Company

There’s a deep, forbidding moat that surrounds Nvidia—and it has nothing to do with hardware.
Illustration: Aaron Fernandez

Forgive me for starting with a cliché, a piece of finance jargon that has recently slipped into the tech lexicon, but I’m afraid I must talk about “moats.” Popularized decades ago by Warren Buffett to refer to a company’s competitive advantage, the word found its way into Silicon Valley pitch decks when a memo purportedly leaked from Google, titled “We Have No Moat, and Neither Does OpenAI,” fretted that open-source AI would pillage Big Tech’s castle.

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