Guys, please read the article. Yes NVIDIA sells servers already. What they mean is they are going to also do other system parts that currenlty the partners are doing.
> Starting with the VR200 platform, Nvidia is reportedly preparing to take over production of fully built L10 compute trays with a pre-installed Vera CPU, Rubin GPUs, and a cooling system instead of allowing hyperscalers and ODM partners to build their own motherboards and cooling solutions. This would not be the first time the company has supplied its partners with a partially integrated server sub-assembly: it did so with its GB200 platform when it supplied the whole Bianca board with key components pre-installed. However, at the time, this could be considered as L7 – L8 integration, whereas now the company is reportedly considering going all the way to L10, selling the whole tray assembly — including accelerators, CPU, memory, NICs, power-delivery hardware, midplane interfaces, and liquid-cooling cold plates — as a pre-built, tested module.
I talked to someone at Nvidia ~2019 or ~2020 and their plan at the time was to completely vertically integrate and sell compute as a service via their own managed data centers with their own software, drivers, firmware, and hardware so this seems like just another incremental step in that direction.
That's one way to arrive at an IBM Mainframe like model I guess.
It'll work until you can buy comparable expansion cards for open systems (if history is any guide).
Yep, tech is incredibly circular. Once Nvidia gets there is highly probable that "disruptive" competition will apear due to mere desire/pressure for more freedom and options (and knowing NVDA, also costs).
In 2019 or 2020 that probably seemed reasonable.
Now? You would have to tell me nVidia was also building multiple nuclear power plants to get the scale to make sense.
They're invested in nuclear power. Pairing datacenters with small modular reactors is at least on the minds of all the AI companies.
Nvidia already sells servers?
What I don't really get, is that Nvidia is worth like $4.5T on $130B revenue. If they want to sell servers, why don't they just buy Dell or HP? If they want CPUs want not buy AMD, Qualcomm, Broadcom or TI? (I know they got blocked on their ARM attempt before the AI boom) Their revenue is too low to support their value, shouldn't they use this massive value to just buy up companies to up their revenue?
>why don't they just buy Dell or HP?
Why buy a low margin business that comes with a lot of baggage they don't need, when they can have Dell and HP compete against each other for Nvidia's benefit?
Don't they already sell servers? https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/dgx-platform/
I had the same reaction. Haven't they been selling DGX boxes for almost 10 years now? And they've been selling the rack-scale NVL72 beast for probably a few years.[1]
What is changing?
Cutting out the Vendor like SuperMicro or HPE, they are going straight to consumer now.
When nVIDIA sells DGX directly they usually still partner with SuperMicro, etc. for deployment and support. It sounds like they're going to be offering those services in-house now, competing with their resellers on that front.
Hyperscalers and similar clients don't use DGX, but their own designs that integrate better with their custom designed datacenters
It's my opinion that nvidia does good engineering at the nanometer scale, but it gets worse the larger it gets. They do a worse job at integrating the same aspeed BMC that (almost) everyone uses than SuperMicro does, and the version of Aptio they tend to ship has almost nothing available in setup. With the price of a DGX, I expect far better. (Insert obligatory bezel grumble here)
Competing with your customers can be a risky strategy for a platform provider. If the platform abandons the neutral stance its customers will be a lot more open to alternatives.
Soon OpenAI will make its own chips and Nvidia its own foundational models
In a sense, they already do, since they're heavily invested in CoreWeave. For those unfamiliar, CoreWeave was a crypto company that pivoted to building out data centers.
It's interesting to se the market try to do anything to rally. The problem is you guys are rallying on the thought that you've scared the Fed into cutting rates, but actually by rallying you short circuit it. You ensure they won't cut. And that's how the market's lillypad hopping thinking is actually just stupidity. You rallied, so now there are no rate cuts so the crash will be even more brutal.
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