Naturally, people are asking when the competition will jump in and start grabbing some of that pie? That question is tough to answer with certainty, but at this stage, it looks like it will be very difficult for competitors to gain market share or even for the likes of Amazon and Microsoft to build competitive chips in-house.
That is because the big data centre players are so entrenched in the Nvidia network. Nvidia's networking revenue is now sitting at $10 billion per annum. To be clear, this is not from selling GPUs. This is the technology and equipment that allows all their products to talk to each other, like switches and cables. For example, Azure has 29 000 miles of InfiniBand connectivity cabling.
They also recently launched Spectrum X, which, according to CEO Jensen Huang, offers 60% better networking performance for AI communication than any other product in the market. They are not just selling chips, they are selling all the equipment that connects the GPUs.
Lastly, Nvidia owns software that runs these data centres. That part of the business has an annual revenue of around $1bn - small but growing fast. It is going to be very difficult to compete with all of that.