Nvidia’s Cloud Strategy Evolves, Factory-Cognition Drama, Instinct Pushes Into Shopping | Diet TBPN

Nvidia's journey in the cloud computing space has taken a fascinating turn, moving away from its initial aggressive stance of directly competing with major cloud providers. What began as a bold declaration to aggregate underlying compute and become a "front door to compute" has transformed into a more nuanced, collaborative strategy. This evolution, alongside ongoing drama in the AI startup scene and Instinct's foray into e-commerce, paints a dynamic picture of the current tech landscape.

Nvidia's Cloud Evolution: From Competition to Collaboration

In 2023, following the "chat moment," Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang announced an "iPhone moment" for AI, envisioning Nvidia as a one-stop shop for compute, directly challenging AWS, Azure, and GCP. This aggressive move, fueled by the acquisition of Leptin in April 2025 (rumored for $300-900 million), aimed to build a "planetary scale AI factory." The initial sentiment was that Nvidia, with its immense leverage as the world's largest company, could dictate terms to the "neoclouds" like Coreweave. These smaller cloud providers faced a dilemma: participate and risk losing direct customer connection and margin compression, or refuse and risk Nvidia directing workloads to competitors who did sign up. This created a period of significant tension.

However, the reality played out differently. The DGX product, Nvidia's direct offering, didn't universally outperform existing neocloud services. The benefits of working with established cloud providers, both traditional and neo, remained significant. Consequently, Nvidia became more collaborative with companies like Coreweave. Instead of aggregating demand and layering customers, their product evolved into a "unified AI platform." This platform now offers proprietary software, leveraging the CUDA moat, to manage GPU node groups, dev pods, batch jobs, inference endpoints, storage, and more. Crucially, it allows customers to use their own hardware and maintain direct relationships with GPU owners. This shift has largely appeased the neoclouds, ensuring their continued safety and fostering a more balanced ecosystem where Nvidia provides the foundational tools rather than acting as the sole gatekeeper.