Something very important about NVIDIA that I’ve been wanting to write about for some time- so taking the time now to share Many / most people with prestige on this app by virtue of the economy we’ve had for the past 20 years have a SWE background. Their experience is based on manipulation of bits I feel blessed to have worked as a Global Sourcing Manager (GSM) at Apple. The only big tech company prior to AI that was Supply Chain driven I saw first hand what happens with compounding at Apple in their supply chain, a concept many people, not even @dylan522p really understand- about why Nvidia is likely to compound its dominance Go back to 2007. The first iPhone released, very popular, exciting product etc. At the time, and this is a very important point, the landscape of consumer electronics was split up into different product categories. Nokia, Motorola, Blackberry were in the cell phone category. Dell, HP, Lenovo in the PC space . Apple came in and did something peculiar- it was a PC company that shipped a cell phone *wow* - at face value, it’s interesting but so what People realized about the software and ecosystem and all that stuff way later, but thats not really why Apple won so hard. At least its not the only reason Really what happened was something more relevant to today- and here’s what people who haven’t seen Apple supply chain up close probably cannot understand, including Dylan Apple became a demand aggregator. The profit margins from phones and laptops went into the same bank account, funded the same pool of R&D, and went into the same inventory budget, and Apple was very careful about SKU expansion. They knew that one of their superpowers was concentrated spend with suppliers, a giant carrot and stick A unified reference design, running a unique operating system, with a focus on co-design between its product categories. While Dell, Lenovo, Nokia, and Motorola were big businesses by any standard, they were fragmented relative to Apple, and over time suppliers began to allocate increasing dollar share of their R&D budget to supporting Apple So Apple, with one unified reference design, a focus on co-design between it’s products, turned into a unified stack which suppliers could put huge, concentrated effort behind, and see product quality and volume go up and up as inevitably polish begot polish Dell, HP, Lenovo never stopped being “big” businesses by most standards, the phone landscape shifted towards Samsung away from Nokia and Motorola, but the important thing is that today we don’t really even view as DELL as a competitor to Apple, we recognize that due to many factors comparing the two is Apples to Oranges (pun intended) In the same way, I’m highly confident we’re going to look back on NVIDIA relative to custom ASIC programs much the same way. TPU, like DELL will likely remain a “big” business- but will be incomparable to NVIDIA because of this compounding. We’re going to forget we ever seriously viewed the two as being close competitors. Lenovo like Tranium is still a “big” business, but again, no comparison at all to Apple / NVIDIA The takeaway is in physical businesses, Supply Chain advantages are all important, and they compound. Suppliers who can lean into a single reference design inevitably leads to more polish, higher volume / more growth, more R&D dollars, and executive focus. Over time those factors compound and become overwhelming because in the world of atoms, momentum is not a button click away. Inertia is insanely powerful, especially if the leader is hungry and pressing their advantages