I used to love Nvidia... that is, until I started to use more of their high-end, more expensive products.
The more I bought them and tried to use them, the more I saw Nvidia shipped buggy, faulty products that simply don't live up to the hype (or even the claimed specifications).
And when I tried to have a $9000+ GPU replaced under warranty, well within the claimed warranty period, Nvidia refused. They stopped responding and took zero responsibility for their faulty product.
Then I checked the pricing for their newest "Spark Station" products (based on the GB 300 chipset) shipping now. One systems integrator quoted me $180,000 for a single system. And I knew there would be virtually zero driver support and no warranty support either, based on my previous experience.
So I said no.
I used to be a fan of Jensen Huang (he's from Taiwan, where I lived for a few years), but now I increasingly see him as a sales hypester pushing product fantasies that don't ship on time, that don't perform to spec, and that simply aren't worth the money. It all seems like vaporware gaslighting to pump up Nvidia's stock price now.
AMD's Strix Halo platform, I found, runs LLM inference models (even very large ones) at very close to the same speed as NVIDIA hardware, but for typically less than half the price. And they use a lot less power, too.
Apple Mac hardware has much faster unified RAM and is becoming increasingly popular for AI projects, with long wait times due to the surge in orders from customers.
Meanwhile, Nvidia keeps promising revolutionary chipsets that never ship on time and that utterly lack driver support or warranty support when they do actually ship.
Just a couple of months ago, they DOUBLED the prices of their 5090 cards, raising them from around $2500 to $5000 with no real justification that made any sense. They were just PRICE GOUGING their customers because they could get away with it.
If you want a $5,000 brick on your desk, buy an Nvidia DGX Spark. And hope it doesn't set your desk on fire, because it has horrifically bad thermal management and has been known to literally melt many materials. The AMD Strix Halo platform (I own some mini-PC boxes running it) run cool and quiet, with a fraction of the energy usage.
Like I said, I used to be a fan of Nvidia. But something changed with them. It seems they abandoned quality control. They became obsessed with higher stock prices instead of higher quality products. They abandoned their customers and price gouged them wherever they could. Using Nvidia products feels like you're fighting against a corporation that hates you.
That's why I'm done with Nvidia. My company typically spends several hundred thousand dollars a year on hardware, and I run a mini data center with 48 workstations and a few proper rackmount servers, serving millions of users with high-quality AI content creation, AI-enhanced research engines, infographic image generation and more.
From now on, I'm ditching Nvidia and looking elsewhere. Intel, AMD, Apple, TensTorrent... I'll take my AI business to a company that actually cares about its quality, its warranties and its customers.