When this walled garden is the only way to use GPUs with high efficiency and everybody is using this stack, and NVIDIA controlling the supply of these "platform boards" to OEMs, they don't make money, but they literally print it.

However, AMD is coming for them because a couple of high profile supercomputer centers (LUMI, Livermore, etc.) are using Instinct cards and pouring money to AMD to improve their cards and stack.

I have not used their (Instinct) cards, yet, but their Linux driver architecture is way better than NVIDIA.

I think he was asking how HPC makes money. The answer as far as I know is that it often does not for anyone other than the vendors.

I wonder where you got your information on AMD’s “Linux driver architecture”. It is reportedly a mess:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34832660

So far, I have been very happy with Nvidia’s Linux drivers.

HPC is used in research, which is often not expected to make money. The hope is that the research will result in something that makes money. One example would be drug discovery. Another would be weather prediction, which is not so much a way to make money, but to minimize losses.

Having the complete ecosystem affords them significant margins.

As of today they have SaaS company margins as a hardware company which is practically unheard of.

What?

It's like the most profitable set of products in tech. You have companies like Meta, MSFT, Amazon, Google etc spending $5B every few years buying this hardware.

What is stale money?

Hmm. There is a lot of money that exists, doing nothing. I consider that stale money.

Edit: I can’t sort this out. Where did all the money go?

Have you looked under your sofa?

Sadly it’s just stale goldfish and magnetites.