Nvidia has a bigger structural problem: the pressure and possibility of escaping CUDA has never been higher, and if Anthropic and OpenAI win, Nvidia's profits — and its novel financing gamble — will be squeezed.

The author argues Nvidia's CUDA moat is weaker than ever because AI workloads now happen on top of models rather than CUDA frameworks, Anthropic has not depended on CUDA for years, and OpenAI is moving away for inference. The residual-value backstop even implies Nvidia's profits are already being squeezed. ✦ AI generated

Stratechery author · Stratechery · 2026-08-11 · original ↗

In the before-times, i.e. before the release of ChatGPT, Nvidia was building quite the (free) software moat around its GPUs; the challenge is that it wasn’t entirely clear who was going to use all of that software. Today, meanwhile, the use cases for those GPUs is very clear, and those use cases are happening at a much higher level than CUDA frameworks (i.e. on top of models); that, combined with the massive incentives towards finding cheaper alternatives to Nvidia, means both the pressure to and the possibility of escaping CUDA is higher than it has ever been (even if it is still distant for lower level work, particularly when it comes to training). The situation today, with Anthropic and OpenAI appearing to pull away, is even more problematic: Anthropic has not been dependent on CUDA for years, and OpenAI is moving in that direction, at least for inference. If those companies win then Nvidia’s profits will be squeezed — indeed, the implication of that backstop is they already are.

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