INTC CTO Compares Nvidia To 1990s Intel, Lauds Its ‘Smart’ Acquisitions

• How Intel used Wintel and x86 to crush competition, Nvidia has used its CUDA platform to create a software moat that keeps developers locked into its GPUs, Ranade wrote.
• NVDA faces competition from AMD and hyperscalers, which are developing their own data center chips.
• Nvidia will report its first-quarter results on Wednesday.

Intel’s Chief Technology Officer, Pushkar Ranade, said present-day Nvidia resembles the Intel of the 1990s, with the company having built superior products and a formidable software moat – advantages the AI chip giant is further strengthening through “smart” strategic investments across the cloud supply chain.

In a new blog post on X, Ranade said Intel used the “Wintel” ecosystem and x86 software compatibility to crush technically superior RISC rivals like Sun Microsystems and Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) at the time. Similarly, Nvidia has used its CUDA platform to create a software moat that keeps developers locked into its GPUs, even when rivals offer competitive hardware.

NVDA Extends CUDA Moat

Nvidia’s CUDA strategy mirrors Intel’s decades-long platform strategy, he argued, adding that Nvidia spent 16 years building CUDA, investing in libraries, partnerships, developer tools, and frameworks long before AI became mainstream.

Comparing Nvidia’s current dominance in AI infrastructure to Intel’s dominance in PCs during the Pentium era, Ranade said Nvidia was founded in 1993 — the same year Intel launched the Pentium chip that cemented Intel’s empire.

Now, Nvidia may have built an even deeper moat than Intel because it controls not only chips, but networking, software, AI frameworks, and entire rack-scale systems — whereas Intel mainly controlled CPUs alongside Microsoft’s Windows ecosystem.

NVDA Competition

At the same time, Nvidia faces competition from chip and cloud companies. AMD is the closest merchant silicon competitor, and its “hardware is competitive,” Ranade said. Meanwhile, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are investing heavily to scale their custom chips for data centers.

Nvidia’s Investment Strategies

Nvidia is also using its cash reserves smartly. The company acquired chip start Groq last year – a deal Ranade sees as similar to Intel’s 1998 acquisition of DEC’s Alpha IP – and has been picking up strategic stakes. In the past few months, Nvidia has invested in neocloud companies CoreWeave, Nebius, and IREN; AI startups OpenAI and Anthropic; and component makers such as Lumentum and Corning, among others.

“NVIDIA is using its massive windfall to make smart acquisitions across the technology stack, covering nearly every potential emerging trend from optical interconnects to quantum computing,” Ranade wrote.

The blog comes ahead of Nvidia’s first quarter report, scheduled for Wednesday. NVDA shares are up 21% year to date, and the latest retail sentiment reading was ‘extremely bullish.’ Analysts expected revenue to rise 80% to $79.23 billion, and adjusted profit to rise 120% to $1.78 per share.

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