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To be honest, I think regulators should have stepped in to stop the acquisition of Melannox (Infiniband) by NVidia. There are basically no non-NVidia options for Infiniband now. (Infiniband being about half an order of magnitude ahead of Ethernet at any one time, with lower overhead and lower cost per unit bandwidth. Often the basis for high bandwidth Ethernet cards as well. And ostensibly an open standard.)

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I agree that I’m uncomfortable with the consolidation of so much of the HPC stack under Nvidia (and would be 10x more uncomfortable if the ARM acquisition went through), but I don’t think there was really a monopoly there. I think the real “market” is networking, not just infiniband, and in that sense there is a ton of competition, just no competition that hits the performance characteristics that Nvidia/Melanox achieve.

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