Oxide's goal is that they, and by extension their customers, have as much visibility and control over the software stack in these racks as possible, and that includes firmware. They started developing these systems before the current wave of interest in machine learning led by ChatGPU and Stable Diffusion really got underway.

Nvidia GPU drivers are very proprietary, which means that admins and developers have limited visibility into them if they misbehave in any way. This goes against Oxide's philosophy of full visibility into a system that you purchase.

Nvidia's CUDA software has a significant lead ahead of AMD and Intel GPUs, and they're not going to open source it any time soon. But this is a rapidly changing landscape, and AMD and Intel and others are pouring an enormous amount of research into getting their hardware and software to match what Nvidia has going. Nvidia is in pole position, but they're not guaranteed to stay there.

There's still a large market for the CPU workloads that Oxide is offering. For now, Oxide will be concentrating on meeting this traditional compute demand. But you're right to point out that in 2023, the absence of a top tier GPU in these racks is noticeable. I suspect Oxide will want to include some form of GPU or TPU into the next version of their system, but they won't just grab whatever hardware happens to be in fashion. It needs to work with their system as a whole.

There is still a huge amount of stuff not using GPU and never will. Claiming that's only for 2020 is pure nonsense.

They are likely looking at future racks with GPU as well, but as a first product getting the basics right makes more sense.

I don't think they're trying to be AWS. They're trying to sell a product that greatly simplifies doing on-site cloud for companies. So they sell the physical hardware/software bundle and not time.

They want a lot of control over all the hardware in their servers. NVIDIA isn't interested in that, so they can't provide those types of servers.

Now to see how their development timeframes and synchronization efforts with big hardware companies go.

This is where they will enter the real “hard” part of hardware, with an exec team from software. Can they respond to the market while making hardware?

They seem to have presented as generally thoughtful about their approach. If they can release major variants about annually or even sub-annually that is what I think will enable them to win.

This seems to be around selling the whole piece of hardware not just "time on that".

That being said I'd still expect a monthly service fee for networking, electricity and service in general.