For now there doesn’t seem to be anything on the horizon that threatens Nvidia dominance that might turn it into another Cisco.
Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google
181–190 of 379 posts
Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google
#182Somehow 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 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…
> But the only reason you're mad at Nvidia is because they made something desirable
This is true. It's like blaming the company for being successful. "Stop making products that are so much better than any other product".
I'm not sure we want that?
Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google
#183When there's a gold rush, sell the best shovels you can make.
Pretty much the business model of Steam, Amazon, nVidia, Nintendo, all to some degree, we can go on and on.
Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google
#184Somehow 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 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…
I don’t have hard evidence of this, which makes it a thought experiment and not an assertion.
Big-cap tech is utterly notorious for some of the worst anti-trust violations and other cartel-style behavior of any sector. This goes back as least as far as “Wintel” in the 90s and probably further that I didn’t watch up close. Suffice it to say that the Justice Department is extremely disincentivized to go after domestic economic Cinderella stories in a globally competitive world and has had to bring lawsuit after lawsuit on everything from bundling to threatening OEMs to flagrant wage fixing in print (I do have second-hand that the mass layoffs are coordinated aka Don’t Poach 2.0).
Crippling “gaming” (high margin but not famine-price gouging margin) cards, controlling supply tightly enough to prevent the market clearing at MSRP routinely, stepping at least up to and likely over the line on the GPLv2: these things or things like them have been ruled illegal before (though it’s hard to imagine that happening again).
It’s possible that tech is just a natural monopoly and we had it right with Ma Bell: innovation was high, customer prices were stable and within the means of most everyone, and investors got a solid low-beta return.
It’s easy to view the past with rose-colored glasses and the Bell Era wasn’t perfect, but IMHO this status quo is worse.
Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google
#185As much as I’d like to say it’s overpriced, its only potential competitor, AMD, is even more overpriced with an eye watering P/E of 324 as of right now, three times that of NVIDIA. Such numbers are stark raving insanity for hardware companies. For comparison, Apple, fully in possession of the world’s most valuable brand, and a gigantic money printer powered by a loyal, billion+ user strong customer base, and a deep p…
Intel is jsut as much a competitor to Nvdia as AMD. I suspect they will work together on creating a CUDA alternative which is the biggest problem both of them face. If they can figure it out I dont see how nvdia isnt fucked as the money is in the big cloud purchasers who have every incentive to switch as soon as a legitimate alternative presents itself. Even if amd/intel dont beat Nvdia coming close with a product th…
Intel can’t even make a competitive CPU anymore, let alone a competitive compute-oriented GPU. It’s way behind on lithography, with no end in sight. Their GPUs also aren’t properly integrated with any popular DL framework. I honestly have no idea what they’re thinking. If I were them, at least PyTorch would work flawlessly with their current Arc offerings. It doesn’t - it’s a decidedly “enthusiast” affair for people with too much time on their hands. You don’t even need a huge team for this. 25-30 competent C++ folks for 9 months to a year is all it takes.
Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google
#186And with a P/E ratio of 95, versus 25 and 59 for Google and Amazon, respectively!
The thing with P/E ratios is that they are backwards looking while stock prices represent future estimations.
Bankers put together detailed models to estimate the earnings per share in the future. Yes they are estimates, but informed as best as possible.
The model spits out an estimated $/share. If the current price is lower, they think the future value of the share is actually higher than the current price, so they buy or convince others to buy.
Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google
#187Considering how much money Amazon and Google (and Microsoft and Oracle and....) are giving NVIDIA, this makes sense. Amazon and Microsoft in particular seem to be staking a pretty big part of their business on things that need GPUs. And even though Amazon makes GPUs, they are still buying NVIDIAs by the truckload.
Amazon buys whatever they can sell to customers. You want windows? We got that. Oracle, got it. Amd, got it, Intel, got that. Mac, got that. Arm? Got that. Nvidia, got it. Their own arms, got em. Their own training and inference? Got it. They buy things by the cargo ship load.
Alright, alright! We got it already.
Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
One of them was called Xerox: American Samurai, and dates from 1986 (I read it when I was a teenager in the early 1990s, I think). There was another one from the early 1990s, I believe.
This book lauded Xerox's success at reforming its corporate culture, regaining a strong position in the photocopier market and even spent a chapter detailing their success in getting into electronic typewriters!
With the benefit of hindsight the company didn't survive its core product losing all relevance any better than Kodak did, but that was still some way in the future (if foreseeable by the 1980s).
That said, much of the material about a hugely bloated organisation, with a sclerotic bureaucracy and lots of cushy middle managers assembled through a previous period of explosive growth, turning out poor-quality product, sounds very reminiscent of some of what we now hear about the current big tech companies.
The title reflects another American obsession at the time - the idea that the US was "losing" to Japan.
Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google
#189Somehow 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…
Big tech and AI startups would buy all the 4090's in existence if they had NVLink. You would not be able to find one for gaming without a multiple x markup
Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google
#190Nvidia is still run by a founder, while the other two aren’t. I’d always bet on a founder over a McKinsey consultant or a Harvard MBA.
What a minor thing to extrapolate into your world model.