> AI compute hardware is not a commodity. And in a shortage, commodities can command high margins.

I don't see the distinction you're drawing about "commodity", but I'm happy to be wrong on that. My point was that spaceX's ai division is buying all their inputs from external vendors and can't meaningfully differentiate themselves from person Y who buys all the same hardware except for the fact they bought them first. Which...

> Correct. But charging people now generates incumbency advantages

I don't see now this is an "incumbency advantage". There's nothing that sticks their clients to stay there and sign up for the next data center.

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JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> don't see the distinction you're drawing about "commodity"

People pay markedly more for NVIDIA GPUs than they do for others. That opposes the fungibility requirement of a commodity.

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bleepblap 4 hours ago | parent [-]

In the west, there's no actual competitor to NVIDIA hardware. Yes, people make other chips, but nothing is a serious drop-in replacement for the nv stack. Between the networking and software, they're truly a different "thing" of accelerator, and I don't consider them fungible at all. The US government tried to build 3 supercomputers with each of nvidia/amd/intel accelerators and you can see how it went

	▲	JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> there's no actual competitor to NVIDIA hardware...I don't consider them fungible at all Which is why nobody should claim NVIDIA makes a commodity.