New York Times 2026-03-17-3
Nvidia Built the A.I. Era. Now It Has to Defend It.
Nvidia is the first major chipmaker to unbundle training from inference at the architecture level, pairing its GPUs with Groq's inference-optimized LPUs in a $20B licensing deal. The supply chain math is as interesting as the product: Groq on Samsung fab with no HBM dependency sidesteps both TSMC allocation constraints and memory chip shortages. If inference grows to 70-80% of total AI compute spend, the companies building chip-agnostic inference routing will capture a new middleware layer that doesn't exist yet.