Nvidia's Moat, Proven By A 6-Year-Old Chip

Core Insights - Nvidia reported a remarkable 73% year-over-year revenue increase and a 75% rise in net profits for Q4 FY26, highlighting strong financial performance [2] - Despite the focus on new Blackwell chip rollouts, demand for older Ampere (A100) chips remains significant, contributing over $20 billion to Nvidia's quarterly data center revenue [3][5] Demand for Legacy Chips - Approximately one-third of Nvidia's $62.3 billion data center revenue is driven by older architectures, including the A100 and Hopper chips, indicating a critical reliance on these legacy products [3] - The A100 chip is priced around $10,000 on the secondary market, making it more affordable compared to the newer Blackwell GPUs, which can cost up to $50,000 [5] Software Ecosystem and Customer Lock-In - Nvidia's proprietary CUDA software ecosystem enhances customer retention, as it ties developers to Nvidia's architecture, making transitions to competitors costly and complex [4][9] - The integration of CUDA with low-level GPU programming and high-performance libraries creates a strong vendor lock-in effect, which is difficult for competitors to overcome [9][10] Competitive Landscape and Future Risks - While Nvidia currently leads in training stack and developer ecosystem, there is a potential risk as inference becomes more dominant in AI computing, which may lead to increased competition from custom ASICs developed by companies like Alphabet and Amazon [11][12] - If inference accelerates faster than expected, Nvidia's market share in data center expenditures could decline, impacting margins as clients may opt for lower-cost, task-specific chips [12][13]