AI is starting to rewrite the software that made Nvidia untouchable
AI is starting to write the software behind AI, challenging Nvidia's moat: its CUDA software.The shift to AI inference could also weaken CUDA's long-standing dominance.One founder said AI coding won't kill Nvidia's CUDA — it will create a new moat instead.Nvidia's biggest competitive advantage is no longer as untouchable as it once seemed.For two decades, Nvidia's crown jewel wasn't just chips; it was the software that turned them into the building blocks of AI, known as CUDA.Short for Compute Unified Device Architecture, CUDA is the brainchild of longtime Nvidia executive Ian Buck, who heads high-performance computing. It took years to build, with ready-made code for common AI tasks, tools to find bugs, and software that lets thousands of chips work together to train models.Now, some believe AI could eventually automate one of the industry's hardest jobs: building the software that powers AI itself.The industry is at an important threshold, says Jeremy Nixon, a former Google Brain researcher and the founder of AI software startup Infinity.
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AI is starting to write the software behind AI, challenging Nvidia's moat: its CUDA software.The shift to AI inference could also weaken CUDA's long-standing dominance.One founder said AI coding won't kill Nvidia's CUDA — it will create a new moat instead.Nvidia's biggest competitive advantage is no longer as untouchable as it once seemed.For two decades, Nvidia's crown jewel wasn't just chips; it was the software that turned them into the building blocks of AI, known as CUDA.Short for Compute Unified Device Architecture, CUDA is the brainchild of longtime Nvidia executive Ian Buck, who heads high-performance computing. It took years to build, with ready-made code for common AI tasks, tools to find bugs, and software that lets thousands of chips work together to train models.Now, some believe AI could eventually automate one of the industry's hardest jobs: building the software that powers AI itself.The industry is at an important threshold, says Jeremy Nixon, a former Google Brain researcher and the founder of AI software startup Infinity. He told Business Insider his startup used AI coding agents to recreate CUDA-like software for the chip startup D-Matrix in 10 hours — evidence, he said, that one of Nvidia's biggest moats is being crossed.The pressure doesn't only come from startups. Cloud giants like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have spent years building software around their own AI chips, while OpenAI and Anthropic have recently demonstrated AI models capable of generating system software.DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng recently said that coding agents, along with his startup's own programming language TileLang, have made AI software substantially easier to build.Coding agents aren't just helping challengers.Nvidia said developers increasingly use CUDA's code libraries to build AI applications, and that it also "uses AI coding agents to develop CUDA faster and validate at greater scale," said Ankit Patel, Nvidia's vice president of developer ecosystem.Inference could change the CUDA equationIf CUDA's first advantage was software, the second is everything built on top of it.
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- AI is starting to write the software behind AI, challenging Nvidia's moat: its CUDA software.The shift to AI inference could also weaken CUDA's long-standing dominance.One founder said AI coding won't kill Nvidia's CUDA — it will create a new moat instead.Nvidia's biggest competitive advantage is no longer as untouchable as it once seemed.For two decades, Nvidia's crown jewel wasn't just chips; it was the software that turned them into the building blocks of AI, known as CUDA.Short for Compute Unified Device Architecture, CUDA is the brainchild of longtime Nvidia executive Ian Buck, who heads high-performance computing. It took years to build, with ready-made code for common AI tasks, tools to find bugs, and software that lets thousands of chips work together to train models.Now, some believe AI could eventually automate one of the industry's hardest jobs: building the software that powers AI itself.The industry is at an important threshold, says Jeremy Nixon, a former Google Brain researcher and the founder of AI software startup Infinity.
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AI is starting to rewrite the software that made Nvidia untouchable
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