The Green Knight Besieged: Who Is Digging Under Nvidia in the AI Chip Market?

Nvidia retains about 80% of the AI chip market, with estimates of its share varying from 92% two years ago (including gaming GPUs) to 50-60% by 2030. Nvidia's strengths include advanced TSMC manufacturing (4nm Blackwell B200, 3nm Rubin R200, and planned 2nm Rubin Ultra), proprietary NVLink and NVSwitch interconnect, and the CUDA ecosystem used by over six million developers. AMD competes with the Instinct MI400X GPU line (2nm, 20 teraflops, 432GB memory), but its ROCm ecosystem lags CUDA in popularity. Intel remains strong in CPUs, receiving a $5 billion investment from Nvidia in September 2025, and aims to become a contract manufacturer with High-NA EUV lithography. Broadcom, focusing on ASICs, holds about 16% of AI chip revenue, with Google's TPU 8t/8i offering optimized performance for AI workloads but with lower raw specs than Nvidia. OpenAI, Microsoft, and Amazon are developing their own ASICs to reduce cost and power. Investor sentiment turned cautious after Broadcom's earnings triggered a $1.3 trillion market cap loss. US sanctions on China have restricted sales of high-end chips like A100 and H100, while China's ban on domestic firms purchasing American products adds further uncertainty.