Meta can be confirmed as one since they’ve literally mentioned their infra investments and Billions in capex increases until the end of 2025 in every earnings call this year.
Apple historically dislikes NVIDIA and I they would likely rather use their own in-house chip team. They also rely on it by virtue of using OpenAI in upcoming iOS release.
I wonder if the split happened with jobs or after jobs? I thought jobs was good at relationships with everyone else in silicon valley (intel, ati, nvidia, even microsoft)
Apple dropped Nvidia after a few years of Nvidia falsifying thermal specifications on GPU chips.
It drove apple crazy both with high failure rate of MacBooks where the GPU was desoldering itself and general problem of a hot as fuck bottom. Nvidia refused to pay out for damages to Apple as well from what I recall.
IIRC it was with Jobs. Apple wanted to develop their own drivers for their chips from ground up, and NVIDIA was very secretive of their tech, so things went south.
On their own right, they contribute more than many other companies, though. Their kernel is open source, they have given their secret sauces like Grand Central Dispatch away, allowed complex technologies like mDNS (Bonjour), AirPrint, multipath networking to be implemented freely and used widely in a vendor agnostic manner.
macOS is 1000 times better for talking UNIX systems than Windows and is POSIX compliant.
Lastly, they are not hindering the development of Asahi Linux, and did nothing when their devices were reverse engineered. On the contrary, they left a couple of ways open for Asahi guys to boot their distribution directly.
They are not the band of saints, but they are not the underhanded evils like a couple of others.
Yes, but demand for these chips went through the roof because of AI. If Google is on this list it's because they're using them for AI, not because they've got a secret project rendering an insane number of 3D images or something.
I'm saying that Meta and Amazon and Microsoft are all buying these chips in insane numbers for AI—their usage for all other types of GPU activity is at least an order of magnitude less. That's why Nvidia skyrocketed to become the most valuable company over just a few years.
For Google to be on that short list of whales would either mean that they for some reason have a much larger demand for GPUs for non-AI purposes than any of the others have for AI purposes (doubtful) or that they're using GPUs for AI.
I understand why the state of affairs is, the point is that it's pathetic. Google, an AI hardware manufacturer[0], has to eat a direct competitors not in substantial margins in order to offer their customers, external and internal, a viable product.
Other big buyers area: Oracle, CoreWeave, Lambda, Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, ByteDance, Tesla, xAI.
https://observer.com/2024/06/nvidia-largest-ai-chip-customer...