Nvidia Corporation
NVIDIA is AI's rate-limiting enzyme: $4.63T market cap, 78% margins, but customers building alternatives as the ecosystem develops immunity to monopolistic extraction.
NVIDIA functions as the rate-limiting enzyme of AI development. At $4.63 trillion market cap (December 2025), the company's GPUs process every major AI training run—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini. Remove NVIDIA, and AI progress stalls. This is keystone species dynamics at global scale: disproportionate ecosystem impact relative to market share.
The CUDA moat represents 20 years of path dependence. Millions of developers, frameworks optimized for NVIDIA architecture, billions in switching costs—this lock-in mirrors obligate symbiosis where neither party can survive independently. PyTorch runs on CUDA first; every other backend is afterthought. The ecosystem cannot easily defect.
Scarcity creates allocation power. H100s had 36-52 week lead times; Blackwell chips sold out for 12 months before shipping. Jensen Huang allocates "fairly," but Oracle's Larry Ellison described meetings with him as "begging for GPUs." This is a resource bottleneck: no matter how much demand exists, the reaction rate is limited by enzyme availability.
Gross margins reached 78.4%—extraordinary for hardware. Yet warning signs emerge: margins declining to 71%, top 4 customers (Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Google) building in-house alternatives. The ecosystem is developing immunity to monopolistic extraction. Like a parasite pushing host tolerance limits, NVIDIA faces selection pressure from customers evolving resistance.
Nvidia Corporation Appears in 2 Chapters
Nvidia's AI dominance depends entirely on TSMC manufacturing its H100/A100 GPUs - no alternative foundry can match performance at scale.
How AI scaling depends on TSMC's keystone position →Nvidia designs leading-edge chips but relies completely on TSMC's manufacturing capabilities for production.
Nvidia's dependence on TSMC as keystone species →