Of course they are. They're commoditizing their complement.
I want to own the hardware, not play around in an nvidia fiefdom full of nvidia rules.
If you don't want to use CUDA, they expose the PTX bindings to write your own CUDA alternative too: https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/parallel-thread-execution/index...
Also, when running OpenCL, NVIDIA hardware disables multiple DMA engines, and allows only one memory transfer at a time to prevent OpenCL running as fast as CUDA.
Did NVIDIA finally allow open source drivers to access all parts and features of the card to allow feature parity? Last time I checked they were considering a plan for planning a solution to that.
Having said that, I'll try compiling a OpenCL 3.0 program in the cluster, so I can report whether NVIDIA runs this software, and if yes, how well.
Likewise SYSCL although built on top of OpenCL 3.0 primitives, is mostly Intel, which also owns CodePlay, the company that delivered the first working SYSCL compute experience, again neither AMD nor Intel (until it bought CodePlay).
I don't think bits like the GSP firmware will ever be open-sourced, but the opportunity to write better OpenCL drivers has always existed. Some of Nvidia's other proprietary driver backends (eg. GBM, Vulkan) are also decently neglected, but mostly out of disuse rather than malice. I don't think any of these things mean you don't own the hardware.
Nvidia probably likes that ASML is a monopolist (it's called a monopsony). The price is high and Nvidia can't scale as hard as they want to (more general: capital intensive market). This monopsony makes sure that other chip companies can't rapidly scale up and try to beat Nvidia. That there only ever was one other GPU firm (I'm prehistoric; once there were more) and they bungled it on software, is pretty sweet for Nvidia.
On the side of their customers. It would be best for Nvidia if there is free competition for the outputs generated from there GPUs. This maximizes consumer surplus and thus demand. Maximum demand for tokens, is maximal demand feeded in their monopoly. If there is a monopoly right from you, demand is curtailed, and your value is limited.
And that exactly is why you see interest from token generators for chips. Bridge that moat and gain a larger value surplus. Both NVidia and, say, China actively undercutting the token-supplier value chain is quite interesting to watch. It's like the Opium wars with us as somewhat happy customers.
In this same vein, why isn't ASML raising thousands of billions for building their own (subsidiary) chip foundries, while raising prices and starving the market (a little) for their machines.
You're looking this purely through an economic lens, while in reality geopolitical factors play a huge role in what ASML can and cannot do. The US government would likely take an extremely dim view of any new external competitor popping up for their chip foundry industry (especially with all the new US plants being built or planned) and would lean heavily on their vassal/ally the Netherlands to prevent this. Unlike with China, the US has more leverage over the Netherlands[1]
The US security state and US tech giants are joined at the hip, as they have been since the beginning of Silicon Valley[1], right through the Snowden revelations through to the present day[2].
[1] https://nltimes.nl/2026/08/20/us-preparing-force-netherlands...
[2] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/sect...
> Of course they are. They're commoditizing their complement
Then why don't they sell consumer GPUs with tons of memory. They clearly segment the market into consumer versus server/business.
There are a few problems though, primarily, a GPU with lots of VRAM and very high bandwidth is inherently very expensive (on top of which there is also the CUDA premium); AI use cases are better served by SoCs with lower (but still high) bandwidth and more RAM.
They supported OpenCL when Khronos floated the idea of a GPGPU standard to manufacturers, but OEMs didn't want to design scalable hardware or sponsor the software.
No shit Sherlock. Name one company that shared their code to make you NOT to consume their stuff?
It’s a little like the trend of calling developers “engineers”. There’s no actual engineering in the traditional sense but I’m sure developers think it sounds cool to call themselves that.
My point was just that I just find it amusing that people call themselves engineers when the code they produce is so far removed from the level of rigour one would expect in literally any other engineering industry.
I say this as someone who also has family and friends who are actual engineers, if they built bridges and buildings to the same standards that many developers write code, then people would die.
This isn’t meant as a criticism of developers, by the way. Just an observation at the vast differences in the domains and thus the tolerance for errors in the process.
Likewise for labs. I’ve worked in AI startups and the science departments are not something one would think of when you say “laboratory”. I get why the term is used, but it’s still amusing.
I know language isn’t static. It’s something that evolves, like how a “computer” used to refer to a person rather than a thing, but that doesn’t stop me from being amused. But maybe the real issue here is I take myself less seriously than others so I have that capacity to be amused by the titles I’ve held?
Just like everything AI is a "model". It's actually not, but it sounds cool/sciency.
It sounds cool because people in our age are almost obsessed with scientistic performance.
At least AI labs are actually doing experiments.
Dude, where's the src for GPU drivers and the firmware blobs?
Sorry, you can't say it is one of the most open labs without qualifying a proper response to the question above.
Nvidia is also one of the most closed hardware developers around. Two things can be true.
But it is a good example of people talking past one another and not communicating well, I would think.
Nvidia’s history with linux shows the opposite. And as a user running models on a linux/AMD stack, this information does not fill me with hope.
They might be right w.r.t. openness about LLM at the moment, but w.r.t. general software openness they are definitely the opposite of open.
Also if we were just discussing labs, Ai2 opens ~everything with dramatically less resources than Nvidia.
Sure, the models are open weight, but porting the code needed to run them on non-Nvidia hardware is not trivial.
A few years ago everyone said _Open_AI is the the most open labs. How did that turn out? Lots of coy, deceiving actions till the whole company was turned into whatever rent seeking amoral borg adjacent shell of it's former past it is now.
They even share many of their pre-training and even post-training datasets for Nemotron on HuggingFace; for example: https://huggingface.co/datasets/nvidia/Nemotron-Post-Trainin...
Which other lab shares this?
Yes, there is no question NVIDIA wants to lock you into CUDA and their hardware. But also, they’ve consistently demonstrated the most openness when it comes to model training, datasets, and research; even before the LLM era (e.g. StyleGAN).
There’s also modelscope.cn (china’s huggingface) which is worth checking out. I would not be surprised if one day, we have to use China VPNs to download open weight models.