The David and Goliath Story of Breaking GPU Monopolies
There’s something deeply satisfying about watching a small team of developers take on tech giants. This week, I’ve been following the progress of ZLUDA, a project that’s attempting to bring CUDA compatibility to non-Nvidia GPUs, and it’s got me thinking about the stranglehold that monopolies have on innovation—and how sometimes, the most important breakthroughs come from the most unlikely places.
For those not familiar with the technical details, CUDA is Nvidia’s proprietary platform for GPU computing. It’s everywhere in AI, scientific computing, and high-performance applications. The problem is, if you want to run CUDA code, you need Nvidia hardware. Period. This has created a situation where Nvidia doesn’t just dominate the GPU market—they’ve effectively locked it down.
What fascinates me about ZLUDA is the sheer audacity of it. We’re talking about a project that started with essentially one developer taking on one of the most powerful tech companies in the world. Now they’ve expanded to a whopping two developers. Someone in the discussions pointed out that this is the kind of undertaking that would normally require “considerably sized teams” from major companies, yet here we are watching a tiny operation make genuine progress.
The corporate response to this project tells you everything you need to know about how threatened the big players feel. AMD initially supported ZLUDA, then suddenly pulled funding and demanded they revert all their released code. One commenter suggested AMD is essentially “controlled opposition for Nvidia to pretend they aren’t a monopoly,” and honestly, that explanation makes more sense than I’d like to admit.
The legal landscape around these projects is absolutely toxic. Someone mentioned that we had similar projects years ago, but “Nvidia sued them to oblivion.” Others pointed to Oracle’s disastrous lawsuit against Google over Java APIs as a cautionary tale. The fact that companies are more afraid of lawsuits than they are motivated by innovation should tell us something about how broken our current system is.
What really gets under my skin is how this stifles competition and innovation. When I’m looking at hardware for my home lab setup, I want to choose based on performance, price, and suitability for my needs. Instead, I’m often forced to consider vendor lock-in and compatibility issues that have nothing to do with the actual quality of the hardware.
The suggestion that Intel or AMD should throw a million dollars at this project is spot-on. Someone countered that a million isn’t enough, but they’re missing the point. The current team of two developers probably isn’t burning through massive amounts of cash. A million dollars could fund a small but focused team for a couple of years, which might be exactly what’s needed to reach a minimum viable product.
There’s also the broader question of ownership and control. When I buy hardware, I want to actually own it. The fact that manufacturers are “hell bent on owning that aspect” of the products we purchase is fundamentally wrong. This isn’t just about GPUs—it’s about the right to repair, modify, and improve the devices we own.
The encouraging part is that grassroots efforts like this do sometimes succeed. The entire PC industry was built on Compaq’s clean-room reverse engineering of IBM’s BIOS. Sometimes individual developers, working with limited resources but unlimited determination, can achieve what massive corporations fail to do.
Looking at the discussion around alternatives like HIP and ROCm, there’s clearly movement in the right direction. AMD’s ROCm is making progress, and there are other projects like Mojo that might eventually provide different paths forward. The key is having multiple approaches and not putting all our eggs in one basket.
While projects like ZLUDA face an uphill battle against legal challenges and corporate resistance, they represent something important: the belief that technology should be open, competitive, and serve users rather than corporate interests. Whether this particular project succeeds or not, it’s pushing the conversation forward and demonstrating that alternatives are possible.
The real victory won’t be any single project, but the gradual erosion of these artificial barriers to competition. Every small step toward open standards and interoperability makes the entire ecosystem healthier. Even if we’re watching David take on Goliath with a very small slingshot, sometimes that’s exactly what’s needed to start changing the game.