'Nvidia is slowly becoming the IBM of the AI era' says Jim Keller, perhaps forgetting how short-lived IBM's PC monopoly was

Few things are more certain than Jim Keller, ex-AMD and ex-Tesla engineer and current CEO of AI computer company Tenstorrent, making bold claims in public appearances. There is at least one thing more more certain than this, however, this being that Nvidia is firmly cemented as the king AI hardware. Combine the two certitudes and you have Keller, in a recent DemystifySci podcast, stating that «Nvidia is slowly becoming the IBM of the AI era.»

According to Keller, for AI, Nvidia currently has «the best processors by functionality and obvious proof points,» which has meant that «all the big tech companies are in an arms race and they're all calling Nvidia to get allocation» for their new AI processors. This, at least, is certainly true.

2024's exploding AI market almost feels like the stirrings of a brave new world for tech. We don't need futurist Kurzweils persistent and wacky techno-optimism to see that. We also don't need Keller's industry experience to see Nvidia's gigantism. We know it just from the numbers. For instance, Nvidia raked in over $26 billion in Q1 2024, with over $22 billion of this coming from AI datacentre demand. And Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang figures that AI constitutes the «next industrial revolution» that has Nvidia at the centre.

Nvidia's foresight to pivot to AI early on, combined with infrastructures already in place, put them in the prime spot for AI market dominance. No other chip foundry can match demand like Nvidia can. And with big shots like Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta all wanting a slice of the burgeoning but not-quite-there-yet AI pie, there's good reason to suppose that Keller's right and Nvidia could become to AI what IBM was to computers… a few decades ago.

After achieving dominance in the mainframe market for businesses, in the 1980s IBM went on to spawn the personal computer, for a while being the only real game in town for PCs. If you said «PC,» you were talking about IBM. That's what Keller seems to have in mind when he talks