Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 379 posts

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#61

Post by wslh »

dave_sullivan wrote: post #43
pas wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nvidia was already investing heavily that sounds very interesting, can you link/share/describe some details on it? how much did they invest? how? into CUDA? what else?

My statements based on high level meetings I had at the time with all 3 companies when I had started an early neural network PaaS company and was looking for them to invest. Nvidia knew what they were talking about and were already moving that direction, Intel heard about deep learning somewhere but didn't believe there was anything there, and AMD didn't know anything about anything.

Seems like a tale already told on "Only The Paranoid Survive" by Andrew Grove. Now Jensen should add some chapters. BTW I just discovered that their web page/brand is fully invested in AI, the title is: "World Leader in Artificial Intelligence Computing".

I am curious about your PaaS because we were analyzing that business for fun first. A small thread here in HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39329764

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#63

Post by akmittal »

llm_trw wrote: post #40
FredPret wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the sentiment. But the only reason you're mad at Nvidia is because they made something desirable (a GPU that does NN training) but didn't do it in the way you prefer (NVLink, Linux compatibility etc). It's not their fault AMD and others have been asleep at the wheel and handed them the whole market for free. Any company with a monopoly on the hot new thing would try to capitalize on it. When the other GP…

There is _one_ other GPU maker.

They don't even take themselves seriously

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#65

Post by rgmerk »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #19
beebmam wrote: post #3

It seems deeply overvalued to me, as it's pretty likely that NVIDIA's competitors will have parallel computation hardware that competes well enough. I'm personally not a fan of NVIDIA's drivers or the reliability of their hardware.

I’m not sure I would bet an ads/spyware company with admittedly deep deep pockets would beat a specialized hyper focused company at its core business, especially as they have deeper pockets now with 30 years of experience in the sub sector. If Nvidia were wandering in the desert like Cisco I could believe it. But Nvidia isn’t, and I don’t believe Google, Amazon, or others will beat Nvidia at their own game. (Given my…

Have you worked at a large (say 500+ employee) company that you would say isn't "deeply f'ed"?

I once read a fascinating corporate history of Xerox, and that company became deeply, deeply f'ed up in ways that are of their time but do have strong parallels to the issues I understand that FAANG, particularly Google, have.

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#66

Post by system2 »

FredPret wrote: post #30

Nvidia has seen a fantastic, geometric increase in profit [1]. This is exactly the kind of thing growth investors hope for. However, their PE ratio is currently 93. This is the kind of PE growth investors buy at, hoping for geometric earnings growth to kick in, not the situation after such growth has taken place. Which means they'll have to keep 2x-ing that profit for a long time to come. It could be doable but I don…

Is it always about earnings? The market is all about speculation and trust. Unless a competitor obliterates them, I don't see their stock tanking more than 10%. Look at Apple, Google, or even Boeing. Boeing's doors are flying off the planes yet their stock is still higher than October 2023 crash. Nvidia can just go for a stock split and take care of the numbers quickly.

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#67

Post by latchkey »

virtue3 wrote: post #58
latchkey wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true for making things just work, however to really squeeze performance out of a GPU, you need to go lower level and that is tied to the architecture.

This has happened before and it will probably go the same way. Software and compilers will make up the difference, or hardware will become so cheap and ubiquitous it wont super matter. In 3-5 years what will a 10% performance difference matter to you? Then calculate how much that 10% performance difference is going to cost in real dollars to run on nvidia hw and then the fun math should start.

Performance for GPUs isn't just speed, but also power efficiency. The complexity of GPUs doesn't lend itself to just being solved with better tooling. They are also not going to get cheaper... especially the high end ones with tons of HBM3 memory.

Given that data centers only have so much power and AI really needs to be in the same data center as the data, if you can squeeze out a bit more power efficiency so you can fit more cards, you are getting gains there as well.

When I was mining ethereum, the guy who wrote the mining software used an oscilloscope to squeeze an an extra 5-10% out of our cards and that was after having used them for years. That translated to saving about 1 MW of power across all of our data centers.

Let me also remind you that GPUs are silicon snowflakes. No two perform exactly the same. They all require very specific individual tuning to get the best performance out of them. This tuning is not even at the software level, but actual changes to voltage/memory timings/clock speeds.

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#68

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

pb7 wrote: post #46
fnordpiglet wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure I would bet an ads/spyware company with admittedly deep deep pockets would beat a specialized hyper focused company at its core business, especially as they have deeper pockets now with 30 years of experience in the sub sector. If Nvidia were wandering in the desert like Cisco I could believe it. But Nvidia isn’t, and I don’t believe Google, Amazon, or others will beat Nvidia at their own game. (Given my…

>Given my time in FAANG, I also speak from inside knowledge of how deeply f’ed these companies are Please tell us more of your expertise and deep insight, FAANG employee #1,908,680. Google has developed their own chips. Apple has developed their own chips. It’s really not that hard if your pockets are deep enough or the bottom line checks out. When Apple launches their AI offering this year, it’s not going to need NV…

Do you have any knowledge of what it runs on? I was pretty sure it was NVIDIA (accessed through cloud providers as a customer).

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#69

Post by microtherion »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #19
beebmam wrote: post #3

It seems deeply overvalued to me, as it's pretty likely that NVIDIA's competitors will have parallel computation hardware that competes well enough. I'm personally not a fan of NVIDIA's drivers or the reliability of their hardware.

I’m not sure I would bet an ads/spyware company with admittedly deep deep pockets would beat a specialized hyper focused company at its core business, especially as they have deeper pockets now with 30 years of experience in the sub sector. If Nvidia were wandering in the desert like Cisco I could believe it. But Nvidia isn’t, and I don’t believe Google, Amazon, or others will beat Nvidia at their own game. (Given my…

It's interesting that you would name drop Cisco. They exploded in market valuation in 1999/2000, having a near-monopoly on infrastructure that was in high demand due to the Web boom. Nvidia similarly profited from the Crypto/AI boom, but I wonder whether that is bound to end similarly.

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#70

Post by wbsun »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #54
behnamoh wrote: post #16

Somehow I wish it weren't true because I hate monopolies in any markets. Nvidia has been enjoying their absurd premium on consumer and production GPUs and intentionally removed the NVLink capability in the GeForce 4090 series (3090 had them) to avoid cannibalizing their A100 and H100 business. With NVLink, people could chain multiple GPUs and increase the overall VRAM without much reduction in bandwidth. But without…

> Somehow I wish it weren't true because I hate monopolies in any markets. If you peel the layers back... isn't the real monopoly ASML?

I am always wondering why ASML hasn’t got any antitrust lawsuits for their monopoly.
Post reply on HN