CUDA Turns Nvidia Into a Software Company, Locking AI Compute
An opinion piece arguing that Nvidia’s real moat isn’t hardware but CUDA—the software platform and libraries that lock AI workloads to Nvidia GPUs—elevating the company to a software powerhouse. CUDA’s ecosystem, PTX-level control, and a large team of software engineers create a practical edge that outperforms rivals like OpenCL, ROCm, and oneAPI in real-world AI work, akin to Apple’s ecosystem moat. While challengers exist (e.g., Modular), CUDA’s software lock-in makes Nvidia’s dominance durable beyond silicon specs.