Nvidia’s great silicon showdown

Nvidia and its biggest cloud customers are preparing to depend on each other less: hyperscalers are commercialising cheaper custom chips, while Nvidia is recruiting Wall Street to mobilise more than $500bn for customers that buy its infrastructure. Bloomberg Intelligence expects custom chips to reach 49% of AI-chip shipments by 2030 versus Nvidia’s 40%, although Nvidia should retain the revenue lead through versatility, annual product cycles and its software ecosystem. Nvidia is also backstopping up to a quarter of some projects’ costs, blurring supplier, financier and demand generator.