The open platform for semiconductor cost intelligence

NVIDIA commands approximately 80-90% of the AI accelerator market by revenue as of 2025, generating over $100 billion annually from data center GPUs. While percentage share will decline to ~75% by 2026 as AMD and custom silicon scale, NVIDIA's absolute revenue continues to grow because the total addressable market is expanding faster than any single competitor can capture. The structural moat — CUDA's 4M+ developer ecosystem, full-stack platform integration, and priority TSMC CoWoS allocation — ensures dominance for the foreseeable future.

The Nvidia-DeepSeek incident reveals that algorithmic efficiency can be a powerful countermeasure to hardware-based export controls, shifting the geopolitical battlefield from silicon access to intellectual property and optimization expertise. This necessitates a fundamental rethink of technology containment strategies, as China demonstrates the ability to achieve state-of-the-art AI performance even with restricted or less powerful hardware, posing a direct challenge to U.S. technological supremacy.

Microsoft's custom silicon strategy with Maia 200 is less about competing with NVIDIA on peak performance and more about achieving a dramatically lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for its high-volume, internal AI inference workloads. While this reduces direct GPU purchases, it intensifies the battle for TSMC's limited 3nm and advanced packaging capacity, potentially creating new, more complex supply chain bottlenecks for the entire industry.

The AI boom is creating a 'gravity well' for semiconductor manufacturing capacity, pulling resources away from consumer markets and towards high-margin data center components. This strategic reallocation by major memory makers like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron is not a temporary blip but a structural market shift, leading to a projected price surge of over 40% for client SSDs in Q1 2026. Enterprises and PC OEMs must immediately reassess procurement strategies to mitigate significant cost increases and potential shortages.