Scott Herkelman, former senior vice president and general manager at AMD Radeon, has called NVIDIA a “GPU cartel” on the heels of a report that suggests the H100 maker may intentionally delay the shipments of its products for customers who are looking to do business with some of its rivals in the AI space. Herkelman, who left AMD at the end of 2023, claims that this is a tradition of sorts for the company, which currently enjoys a market cap of over $1.97 trillion at the time of this writing.
Herkelman tweeted:
This happens more than you expect, NVIDIA does this with DC customers, OEMs, AIBs, press, and resellers. They learned from GPP to not put it into writing. They just don’t ship after a customer has ordered. They are the GPU cartel and they control all supply.
Miss ya in the space already man, it's felt like a long while already.. To add, Nvidia also did this when trying to offload their surplus of ampere
— Katpitulation (@Overlord_Potato) February 27, 2024
Jonathan Ross, CEO of chip-startup Groq, on how NVIDIA may retaliate against its customers:
- “A lot of people that we meet with say that if Nvidia were to hear that we were meeting, they would disavow it.”
- “The problem is you have to pay Nvidia a year in advance, and you may get your hardware in a year or it may take longer, and it’s, ‘Aw shucks, you’re buying from someone else and I guess it’s going to take a little longer.’”
The Wall Street Journal also shared this about Jensen Huang, NVIDIA Founder, President, and CEO:
Huang’s life has changed along with Nvidia’s growth. He is driven around in a black Mercedes EQS electric car—he doesn’t drive himself any more, he says, for security reasons.