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Hello! Anissa here. Is Nvidia’s CUDA Vulnerable? Tatarchuk likes to poke the bear. The bear, in this case, is Nvidia. Tatarchuk has every incentive to challenge the chip company’s dominance. He runs startup TensorWave, which rents out AI chips from Nvidia rival Advanced Micro Devices. Last year, during Nvidia’s GTC conference, Tatarchuk hosted an event in San Jose, Calif., Beyond CUDA, drawing hundreds of attendees eager to talk about alternatives to Nvidia’s software stack. This year, the event is back—but with a softer tone. Tatarchuk renamed it Beyond Summit, and it starts Wednesday, three weeks after Nvidia’s GTC 2026 took over San Jose. The change wasn’t really his idea. He said some potential sponsors and attendees were hesitant to be associated with an event that so explicitly positioned itself against Nvidia. In an industry where many companies still depend on Nvidia hardware, even symbolic opposition can carry risk, he said. (I get it: I’ve talked to several companies who worry about their relationship with Nvidia, specifically when considering or announcing deals with rival chip companies .) Tatarchuk himself, however, has mixed feelings about the shift. On one hand, he understands the pressure, and he’s able to host a bigger event this year. On the other, the original name captured the point. Nvidia’s chips dominate AI computing, and CUDA is seen as its moat because it provides all of the software needed to easily run the company’s hardware. Even the logistics were a reminder of Nvidia’s gravitational pull. Tatarchuk said he initially planned to host the event in San Jose again but found his previous venue booked out for the next few years—by Nvidia itself. So this year he’s hosting his shindig weeks after GTC, this time in San Francisco. Still, the message behind the gathering hasn’t changed. “There is stuff being built outside of the walled gardens of Nvidia,” Tatarchuk said. A growing number of AI labs are beginning to experiment with large-scale training on AMD chips, he said—something that until recently was rarely discussed publicly. OpenAI and Meta Platforms, for instance, have recently announced large deals with AMD to use its chips for AI processing. Tatarchuk has been increasingly vocal about what he sees as an opening. For the first time in years, he believes customers are willing to at least consider looking beyond CUDA. “AI labs are starting to do large-scale training on AMD, which wasn’t really talked about too much before,” he said. “There are so many sophisticated companies that don’t need CUDA.” At the same time, a group of startups is emerging to chip away at CUDA’s moat: companies building compilers, kernels, optimization layers and other pieces of the software stack. We’ve named some of these firms in our Top 50 Startups List in 2024 and 2025 . Many of them will be at the TensorWave event, he said. Compute Coachella Coachella doesn’t start until this weekend—but a version of it is already underway at Stanford University. A new undergraduate course on AI infrastructure has effectively become “Compute Coachella.” It’s sold out and features a speaker lineup rivaling those of top-tier industry conferences. There’s no Justin Bieber or Sabrina Carpenter—but if you care about chips, power and models, it’s arguably a stronger event. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, AMD’s Lisa Su, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy are all slated to speak this semester. One reason for the big-name cast could be that the class is taught by Anjney Midha, an early Anthropic investor and former Andreessen Horowitz partner, and Michael Abbott, a former Apple engineering leader who pushed the company to build its own cloud service . Both are now working on AMP, the compute venture we’ve written about that aims to make it easier for companies to access infrastructure. Presumably the speakers also want to get in front of the students, whose class project is to use limited AMP computing resources over the next 10 weeks to see if they can produce frontier AI research. In Other News… My colleague Valida Pau and I broke the news of Blackstone buying a stake in Rowan Digital Infrastructure . Microsoft is in exclusive talks with Chevron and Engine No. 1 about developing a natural gas–fired power plant in Texas for data centers, Bloomberg reported. In a video shared by the Tehran Times, a spokesperson for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps threatened that if the U.S. damaged its power infrastructure, Iran would inflict “complete and utter annihilation” of U.S. and Israeli facilities. It specifically called out OpenAI’s Stargate data center in Abu Dhabi , sharing photos of U.S. tech leaders announcing the project in 2025. (A spokesperson for OpenAI did not have a comment.) CoreWeave and Poolside, a data center startup, previously agreed to partner on a 2 gigawatt West Texas data center, but the deal has fallen apart , and now Poolside is looking for a new customer, the Financial Times reported. Upcoming Events Thursday, April 9 — Inside the SaaSpocalypse: What Agents Mean for Software Businesses Join The Information’s Kevin McLaughlin and Laura Bratton as they discuss the future of software businesses with Evan Skorpen, an investor at Lead Edge Capital, and Nimesh Mehta, CISO of National Life Group. More details Monday, April 27 — Financing the AI Revolution Join The Information at the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, April 27, to hear from top executives and investors on how the rapid buildout of AI is reshaping tech, finance, and capital markets More details Wednesday, September 23 — AI Agenda Live SF 2026 Save the date for The Information’s annual AI Agenda Live in San Francisco, where top AI researchers, founders, investors and executives come together for a day of conversations about the breakthroughs and applications shaping the future of AI. More details
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