The Hidden Tax of Multi-Vendor GPU Infrastructure
Copyright: Sanjay Basu AI, Minus the Marketing (Substack Newsletter) Why the Hardest Problems in Heterogeneous Accelerator Deployments Have Nothing to Do with Compute By Dr. Sanjay Basu Everyone is buying GPUs. Not everyone is thinking about what happens after they arrive. The enterprise AI playbook in 2025 reads like a procurement arms race. NVIDIA Blackwell. AMD MI300X. Intel Gaudi 3. Custom ASICs from Google and Amazon. The options are multiplying faster than the engineering teams tasked with making them work together. And somewhere between the vendor pitch deck and the first production training run, a quiet realization sets in. The hard part was never choosing the hardware. The hard part is making it behave like a single coherent system. I spend my days building GPU cloud infrastructure. I have watched teams spend months optimizing a training pipeline on one accelerator type, only to discover that porting to a second vendor's hardware isn't a weekend project. It's an ar...