CUDA Proves Nvidia Is a Software Company | WIRED
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There’s a deep, forbidding moat that surrounds Nvidia—and it has nothing to do with hardware.
Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this storyForgive me for starting with a cliché, a piece of finance jargon that has recently slipped into the tech lexicon, but I’m afraid I must talk about “moats.” Popularized decades ago by Warren Buffett to refer to a company’s competitive advantage, the word found its way into Silicon Valley pitch decks when a memo purportedly leaked from Google, titled “We Have No Moat, and Neither Does OpenAI,” fretted that open-source AI would pillage Big Tech’s castle.A few years on, the castle walls remain safe. Apart from a brief bout of panic when DeepSeek first appeared, open-source AI models have not vastly outperformed proprietary models. Still, none of the frontier labs—OpenAI, Anthropic, Google—has a moat to speak of.The company that does have a moat is Nvidia. CEO Jensen Huang has called it his most precious “treasure.” It is not, as you might assume for a chip company, a piece of hardware. It’s something called CUDA. What sounds like a chemical compound banned by the FDA may be the one true moat in AI.CUDA technically stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture, but much like laser or scuba, no one bothers to expand the acronym; we just say “KOO-duh.” So what is this all-important treasure good for? If forced to give a one-word answer: parallelization.Here’s a simple example. Let’s say we task a machine with filling out a 9×9 multiplication table. Using a computer with a single core, all 81 operations are executed dutifully one ...
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