yesterday at 11:34 PM
Jensen Huang made mistakes that gave opportunities to his enemies. But the bigger mistake was his incredible greed, he should have been a happy supplier of an extremely valuable product, and accept competition and that his quasi-monopoly was only transient. But he wanted the entire cake for himself.
Greed and hubris. I think the turbulences will be painful to some, especially those who counted on Nvidia stock to finance their retirement.
But, big picture, this is good news.
yesterday at 11:52 PM
But they don't have a monopoly. Their marketshare is sinking, down to perhaps 45% of estimated TSMC CoWoS supply next year (down from close to 70% last year).
yesterday at 11:56 PM
75% gross margin. For a market this big. This not healthy free-market competition working as expected.
today at 12:05 AM
I wonder if the large margin is due to off book sales.
today at 12:05 AM
Chip company profitability is notoriously fleeting and cyclical.
today at 12:18 AM
> especially those who counted on Nvidia stock to finance their retirement
well it's no secret that this sort of stock was not that good, I don't think that many people counted on nvidia for their retirement
yesterday at 11:48 PM
Not a monopoly. 3dfx is going to drop the voodoo 6 soon
today at 12:02 AM
today at 12:07 AM
They did what car companies do.
They finance the selling of their inventory.
yesterday at 11:36 PM
Looks like this claim was coming from Ed Zitron
https://respawnfirst.com/multiple-reports-say-nvidia-manufac...
today at 12:20 AM
The claim is coming from the Wall Street Journal
Zitron already has a video about it but he is just reaffirming what the article already said.
today at 12:00 AM
I honestly find his podcast a little grating and his personality needlessly abrasive/smug at times, but at the end of the day I still read and listen here and there because the dude does nail it often enough to warrant some of his attitude.
today at 12:04 AM
This is just feels really misleading. Nvidia invested in startups that would turn around and help the market of companies that would buy from them grow.
That's not "deliberately keeping GPU prices high" and it's really weird to frame it this way.
It is good that Nvidia focused on supporting startups!
yesterday at 10:37 PM
I don't have a WSJ subscription, but was there actually anything weird about the deals? I mean it seems pretty normal.
yesterday at 11:33 PM
"Nvidia was in talks to provide billions of dollars of guarantees to companies that couldn’t afford its chips. That included deals led by Huang’s son-in-law, Nico Caprez, who had been offering upstart cloud providers and data-center developers financing in the hopes of turning them into long-term customers."
...
"Amid the rollout of the program, Kress raised questions including how to decide which deals to pursue, how to value the guarantees, and how to calculate the return on investment, a person familiar with the matter said. Behind the scenes, she tried to rein in Huang’s son-in-law, who had been promoted to a vice president in January, people who worked with her said."
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It sounds like there may have been a little bit of Nepotism. This article also suggests that Huang himself was uncomfortable with the deals Nvidia and the data centres it had invested in were making, although he appeared to shift blame onto those running the data-centres.
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"In Berlin during a conference, Huang, accompanied by his top sales executives, broadcast a new message to a half-dozen CEOs of companies that are major buyers of Nvidia chips who were seated around a circular table. He opened with a story that sounded like a fable, according to people who attended.
Huang had once found a soup vendor in Japan, he said, with a long line of customers. He joined the line, and after a long wait, enjoyed one of the best bowls of soup he’d ever had. When he asked for another serving, the soup-seller told him no—he had too many customers waiting and not enough soup for all of them.
“He’s a better businessperson than all of you,” Huang told the cloud computing CEOs. The soup-man doesn’t sell out all his inventory to one or two customers, but instead keeps prices high and his customer base diverse, the CEO said.
“You are not establishing the value of my products,” he said."
yesterday at 11:13 PM
It can be normal, legal and still morally bankrupt. Fuck these parasites
yesterday at 11:13 PM
Forcing your customers to buy additional hardware they don't need to inflate the prices of your own product is a crime in the united states of america.
It get worse when we find out they did it to increase nvidia production for the purpose of being able to redirect more output to china.
The whole entire AI bubble was actually jensen's smuggling operation to china. These large data centers have no purpose and cost more money in power grid upgrades than any company will ever make operating them.
The only winners look to be jensen's bank account, the bank accounts of the CEOs that signed the deals to buy unneeded hardware, and the chinese buisnesses that were able to buy more nvidia graphics cards.
It is not a crime for these CEOs to drive their companies into the ground to make themselves richer. Most CEOs do this today. It is a crime if we find out all of this was really a chinese smuggling operation and that would make it the largest crime per monetary value in US history.
Everyone who made money on this smuggling ring has criminal liability. Just like with madoff, the people who withdrew gains had to pay it back because the gains weren't real. Not paying it back would make you an accomplice.
yesterday at 11:29 PM
Forcing your customers to buy additional hardware
Ok that sounds interesting and it's not in this article. Where can I learn about that?
yesterday at 11:35 PM
AFAIR nvidia did that by threatening to basically ban them from future supply if they don't buy more than they need now.
A quick search turned this article up https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/faa-orders-...
yesterday at 11:17 PM
Nvidia should be broken up.
today at 12:23 AM
I don't think they need to be broken up. Nvidia needs to be investigated.
There are stories of huge amounts of sold chips sitting in warehouses unused. This could be channel stuffing which is illegal
There are stories of Nvidia threatening that customers have to buy these chips now or they will be cut off and not able to buy the next gen. That may be illegal
yesterday at 11:36 PM
Into what exactly? They have a single product that makes them money.
today at 12:19 AM
Nvidia East, Nvidia West, Nvidia North, Nvidia South
today at 12:21 AM
Mountain Nvidia
today at 12:02 AM
No, competition needs to get their heads together.
yesterday at 11:35 PM
Especially with the buyout of SchedMD, who support Slurm for these large HPC clusters doing the AI training.
yesterday at 11:20 PM
I love to see when capitalism works great and free market is efficient.
yesterday at 11:11 PM
The invisible hand of the free market ;)
yesterday at 11:17 PM
The free market where every innovation is locked up for 20 years behind patent walls? That free market?
yesterday at 11:37 PM
People forget just how unfree free markets are.
Of course, free markets tend to become unfree without regulation they are a bit of a unicorn.
yesterday at 11:49 PM
name a single market that is unfree and unregulated
today at 12:03 AM
The black market of hard drugs is unregulated yet controlled by a few powerful cartels.
today at 12:24 AM
That's still regulation, just by cartels instead of by government agencies. Anyone with the power to put a gun to your head can exercise control over the commerce you conduct.
today at 12:22 AM
I guess you could say he was free to do what he wanted, he fucked around and found out. Had it been “unfree” he would have been backstopped a while ago.
I agree that the “invisible hand of capitalism” is ironic, but the free market is circular in and of itself creating an unfree market.
yesterday at 11:25 PM
The free market that chose of it's own volition to allow participants to either optionally utilize copyright or not?
yesterday at 11:45 PM
I'd love to be able to opt out and ignore copyright laws actually. That would be amazing. Let people ignore the government enforced monopoly and produce what they want in the free market.
yesterday at 11:58 PM
You are free to release products without copyright.
today at 12:11 AM
all the pitch forks are coming out all at the same time, what a coincidence.
yesterday at 11:07 PM
As if we didn’t suspect this. Same with RAM makers not upping production.
It’s like the oil companies whining and fleecing us too.
What’s the move though?
yesterday at 11:19 PM
Remember when Microsoft got in years of antitrust lawsuits over bundling a browser with their OS? Bring back that level of legal scrutiny to antitrust, and sever the absurdly close ties the US government has with the top 100 companies in the country.
yesterday at 11:19 PM
Ram makers are more understandable since they went through this already in the past. The Koreans learned it the hard way.
yesterday at 11:25 PM
yesterday at 11:30 PM
yesterday at 11:16 PM
People are acting like vendors extending financing to their customers is somehow irregular or illegal.
It’s not. It happens ALL THE TIME. This isn’t “circular financing” which is a great meme term but is not factual.