It has become the Central Bank of the AI

Nvidia has gone from manufacturing graphics cards for Gamers First and Crypto miners later to become the referee of the technological future. His mastery of the chips market for ia gives him a power that goes beyond the business: he decides who can compete and who not in the AI career.

Regulating the flow of critical resources towards companies that need them to survive gives it that capacity, as a kind of Central Technological Bank.

The money trail. Nvidia controls more than 80% of the gpus market for AI (some sources They attribute more than 90%), with gross profit margins that They exceed 70%. But true power is not in the numbers, but in the waiting lists.

OpenAI, Google, Meta and virtually any company that aspires to compete in the depend on chips H100 and H200 of Nvidia. The waiting time can be one semester and a year. The difference between getting them or does not determine who launches the next revolutionary model and who is left behind.

Between bambalins. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, personally manages the most important chip assignments. A simple call of yours can accelerate an order or delay it indefinitely. It is a power that no technological executive had had before.

• Amazon and Microsoft have tried to develop their own chips to reduce dependence.
• The results so far are mediocre compared to Nvidia.
• AMD and Intel They try to gain ground, but they are still behind to train LLMS.
• China tries to create alternativesbut it’s back behind.
• Larry Ellison told that he, like Elon Musk and others, “begged” for accessing H100 at a dinner with Huang.

Nvidia’s advantage is not just hardware, it is the software ecosystem (CUDA) that has been developing years.

The big question. How long will this domain last? The history of technology tells us that no monopoly is eternal. But Nvidia has an advantage: every year that passes, its software ecosystem becomes more difficult to replace.

The regulators They begin to pay attentionbut intervening in such a technical and strategic market is complex. And a geopolitical factor comes into play: slowing down Nvidia could mean giving advantage of China in the AI race.

And now what. Nvidia continues to increase the distance with its competitors. Its new generation of Blackwell chips promises to be even more powerful. Meanwhile, companies that depend on their products have no choice but to accept their prices. And his times.

It is a power comparable to that of a central bank: control the flow of the most valuable resource of the digital economy.

• The difference is that central banks have supervision and public mandates.
• Nvidia only responds to your shareholders

In Xataka | Intel has a plan to recover his old glory. The problem is that carrying it will not be easy

Outstanding image | Xataka