“At this point, because AI has become so good at programming, I don't think that CUDA is necessarily their moat or it's not a moat that will stand. At this point, I think their biggest moat is the amount of cash that they have.”
Newt's World · US Politics · October 2026
Newt Gingrich asked why Nvidia has built such a lead. Kumar traces it from being first to see that gaming chips suit AI, to its CUDA software lock-in, to today's war chest. He adds that Nvidia's decade-plus head start on its supply chain will be hard to copy.
Transcript
…concentrated in Asia. Semiconductors Became of all these different reasons, we find ourselves in a situation where the same chip, its different parts of the supply chain are dominated by different regions of the world, and they all have to come together in order to build this finished product.
What is NVIDIA's Why have they built such a huge advantage?
…for your chips. And at some point, there is just so much software that has been written for your chips that nobody wants to move or port that software to someone else's chips. So their second biggest moat was the software. So they have this thing called CUDA, which essentially is a way to write programs for the chips, and that became their moat. So CUDA was their moat for next several years. At this point, Because AI has become so good at programming, I don't think that CUDA is necessarily their moat or it's not a moat that will stand. At this point, I think their biggest moat is the amount of cash that they have. Because they have so much money at hand, they can move faster and quicker than their competitors. They can invest in new technologies. They can move up the stack, focus not only on chips, but entire systems. And they have been doing it very successfully. And finally... We just talked about how complicated the supply chain is. They now have a decade or two head start over all their competitors in…
Coming up, Rakesh discusses the chip rivalry between the United States and China. how Beijing has tried to catch up, and whether America's strategy of cutting China off is working. As you watch China approach this whole area, and you watched our various efforts, what's your sense of the…
So let's... take this as two separate questions. One is, what would be the new normal? Would we see more competitors than US and China? And second, we can talk about what US and Chip Age doing correctly, in my opinion, and where they need to do things differently. So I do agree with you that…
You are right in the middle of one of the most amazing and most important stories in the history of the human race. The scale of change that has been brought about since, say, 1960 is unbelievable. And I think accelerating. When you look back on all this with The chip age, as you describe it, as…
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