Is the CUDA Moat Only 18 Months Deep?
Last week, I attended a panel at a NYSE Wired and SiliconANGLE & theCUBE event featuring TensorWave and AMD, where Ramine Roane made a comment that stuck with me:
"The CUDA moat is only as deep as the next chip generation."
Initially, I was skeptical and even scoffed at the idea. CUDA has long been seen as NVIDIA's unassailable advantage. But like an earworm pop song, the statement kept playing in my head—and now, a week later, I find myself rethinking everything.
Here’s why: NVIDIA’s dominance has been built on the leapfrogging performance of each new chip generation, driven by hardware features and tightly coupled software advancements HARD TIED to the new hardware. However, this model inherently undermines the value proposition of previous generations, especially in inference workloads, where shared memory and processing through NVLink aren’t essential.
At the same time, the rise of higher-level software abstractions, like VLLM, is reshaping the landscape. These tools enable core advancements—such as flash attention, efficient batching, and optimized predictions—at a layer far removed from CUDA, ROCm, or Habana. The result? The advantages of CUDA are becoming less relevant as alternative ecosystems reach a baseline level of support for these higher-level libraries.
In fact, KamiwazaAI already seen proof points of this shift set to happen 2025. This opens the door for real competition in inference workloads and the rise of silicon neutrality—just as enterprises begin procuring GPUs to implement GenAI at scale.
So, was Ramine right? I think he might be. NVIDIA’s CUDA moat may still dominate today, but in inference, it seems increasingly fragile—perhaps only 18 months deep at a time.
This is something enterprises and vendors alike need to pay close attention to as the GenAI market accelerates. The question isn’t whether competition is coming—it’s how ready we’ll be when it arrives.
Phillip Koblence Piotr Tomasik 🌊 Darrick Horton 🌊Brian J. Baumann John Furrier David Vellante Keith Townsend Ryan Shrout