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Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

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Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#71
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD is not too far behind. They can go wild in a few years.

In the LLM world, each month is a year and each week is a month. AMD hasn't done anything substantive in the past two years since GPT-3/GPT-3.5. Almost every research paper implements their algorithm in CUDA. AMD can't beat software with good hardware.

There's more ROCm compatibility than you'd think.

I'm at a startup, and we'd love to be using MI300Xs. Out stack works with it, they are amazing, our wallet is open... But we can't! We simply can't find any. It seems they are unobtanium for megacaps only.

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#73
Nvidia's nvlink is the most im actually most worried about.

Their chips are amazing and their software moat is impressive, but I see clear response & hungered competition from many on these fronts. There's still a sizable lead, but I believe in the competition here.

Nvidia buying Mellanox though means the entire rest of the planet is stuck on PCIe PHY (which includes CXL) or Ethernet. There's no other major interconnect presence left: Nvidia owns both the interesting rack & further scale nvlink & infiniband alrernatives. I don't think there's an insurmountable challenge here, but no one seems gearing up to compete, and there's no forum for that cooperation to compete together with that exists. Nvlink is fast, and even more important, it's very energy efficient per bit. As we go from many core to many chip, this is going to be a more and more distinguishing capability.

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#74
post #66

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.

It's about earnings (freshly made money) and equity (existing money) and growth potential (future money).

One way or another, they need to have money in order to distribute it to me, the investor (through dividends or buybacks).

At a valuation of 90x earnings and only $0.02 in equity per dollar of market cap, I have to pay an insane premium to acquire:

- an anemic stockpile of equity ($50b in assets - $22b in liabilities = $28b in equity. Yours for only $1500b!)

- a tiny cashflow of 1/90 of my investment

- admittedly big growth potential

So the question is - how big is that growth potential? I bet it's not high enough to justify 90x earnings.

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#75

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…

I don't think Nvidia is worried about cannibalizing their A100 and H100 business, I think they're trying to keep the cards something resembling affordable for gamers.

Then why wouldn't they just make more of them? The excuse is supposed to be fab capacity, but the 3070 has better performance than the 4060 etc. and is built on the older process which should no longer be in short supply.

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#76
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm personally not a fan of NVIDIA's drivers or the reliability of their hardware. As compared to AMD or Intel? I wish there was real competition to Nvidia but there isn't. I'm not a fan of their defacto monopoly but they do have the best product on the market and their competition has been asleep for 10 years. AMD and Intel barely knew what deep learning was 10 years ago (and certainly did not appreciate the oppor…

> 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?

> how much did they invest? how? into CUDA? what else?

CUDA 1.0 was released in 2007:

* https://insidehpc.com/2007/07/nvidia-releases-cuda-10/

* https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit-archive

From SIGGRAPH 2007, "GPU computing with NVIDIA CUDA":

* https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1281500.1281647

"NVIDIA: The Era of the Personal Supercomputing":

* https://www.nvidia.com/content/events/siggraph_2007/supercom...

Before AI/ML was hot, and before even the Bitcoin paper was released. NVidia was investigating/experimenting/investing in the concept before there was any kind of 'killer app' for it.

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#77

Insanity. How much of their success/future hinges on TSMC's continued success/future? Kudos to them but the risk makes me uneasy.

Not that much I'd say. They could switch to Samsung or Intel. As long as they can use the same fabs their competitors use they'll be fine.

The early 30 series cards during COVID were made in the Samsung fab. Back in the days of no GPUs available anywhere for months

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#78
post #59
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is _one_ other GPU maker.

Intel makes desktop cards too

and they have more memory bandwidth (per dollar) and more VRAM per dollar

the trajectory looks good if they can just resist giving up early without seeing instant success

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#79
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Have they actually engaged in anticompetitive behavior or are they just the only player?

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#80
post #65

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…

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.

Could you please share any links or pointers for that? Sounds interesting.
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