Nvidia's CUDA lock-in builds a moat (2006 onward)
Nvidia released CUDA, a software platform that made its GPUs the default for scientific and later AI computing. Developers built their tools around it. Rivals with competitive hardware still struggled because the software ran on Nvidia.
CUDA drove GPU adoption in research and finance well before the AI boom.
It became Nvidia's deepest advantage, locking in customers even when competing chips matched on raw specs.
AMD's hardware can match Nvidia on memory and compute, but the harder fight is software. Whether developers port workloads to AMD's ROCm platform will decide if MI400 sells.
