I subscribe to the view that we're probably approaching the'peak of inflated expectations' but not quite yet starting the descent into the'trough of disillusionment. This still raises the probability that we are seeing the emergence of a truly disruptive presence in the HPC space – but perhaps not for the reasons you might expect. We've already seen how the current dominance of GPUs in the training of current ML/DL techniques has powered Nvidia to record revenues in the datacenter. But is that hegemony set to be challenged? At last count there were 25 or more start-ups emerging from stealth or already within a few quarters of shipping hardware implementations aimed directly at accelerating aspects of training and inference.