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Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

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331–340 of 379 posts

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> agreed, it's very high, but with M2 growing again such outlandish valuations seem sustainable. You know whose M2 has also been rising for decades ? Japan's. And yet for most of that time the Nikkei has been flat (even negative): * https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=17sx4 China's M2 has also been going up steadily: * https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MYAGM2CNM189N What has the Shanghai Stock Exchange (index) been…

you're missing the investor preferences bit. You could print $7T or whatever crazy amount Sam Altman wants, and if everyone puts that money under their mattress instead of stocks or spending, there will be no observable effect on the real or financial economy. In short, the transmission mechanism of money creation to real effects is laggy and and somewhat unpredictable. e.g. why NVDA and not gold?

> you're missing the investor preferences bit. You could print $7T or whatever crazy amount Sam Altman wants, and if everyone puts that money under their mattress instead of stocks or spending, there will be no observable effect on the real or financial economy.

If you go through my posting history you'll see I've more than once mentioned that velocity is much more important than simple quantity.

A good analogy from Cullen Roche that I often use:

> But also – why do so many people insist that inflation is an increase in the money supply? This makes zero sense. Here’s why – our economy is mostly a credit based economy. So, if I take out a loan for $100,000 then the money supply has technically increased by $100,000. But what if I don’t actually tap that loan? What if I borrow the money because, for instance, house prices just went up 25% and I want to have some cash around for emergencies? This doesn’t tell us anything about prices, living standards or really anything. But this is what so much of the money supply represents – money that has been issued and is just sitting around unused. Why is this useful? It’s like calculating your weight changes by counting how much food you have in your refrigerator. No. That’s potential calories consumed and potential weight gain. The amount of food in your fridge tells you little about your future weight changes just like the amount of money in the economy tells us little about the actual price changes in the economy.

* https://www.pragcap.com/three-things-i-think-i-think-i-see-d...

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is in my profile. Pretty well disclosed imho.

It is a norm here and a common courtesy to let people know whenever one mentions their own company, product, or project. Otherwise, we don’t know that a comment might be self-marketing. And yes, yours was an instance of self-marketing, even if unintentional, by name-dropping your company alongside power players like Meta and Tesla. You put yourself on people’s radar as a GPU-intensive company.

The guidelines state:

"Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity."

What I posted, just the name of my company, was entirely within the bounds of common courtesy.

Of course, I do want to put myself on people's radar... I am building a GPU-intensive company and I'm making a small relevant comment on a thread.

I looked it up. Over the years, there has been endless bike shed discussion on this topic, such as:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24353959

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36404027

I think that it is smart of the moderators here to simply sit on the sidelines and not try to control the discussion of this too much.

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#333
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I did not intend to be confrontational and you are correct that talking up your company without declaring your affiliation is not against HN guidelines. I feel it is however a convention that is widely followed and for good reasons. Obviously your call at the end of the day.

The guidelines state:

"Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity."

I was not "talking up" my company. I made a reference to it, by name, on a relevant thread. This is well within the guidelines.

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#334
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are right to worry about power efficiency. Though do keep in mind that power is also fungible with money, especially in a data centre. I suspect a lot of AI inference (thought probably not the majority) will happen on mobile devices in the future. There power is also at a premium, and less fungible with money.

> Though do keep in mind that power is also fungible with money, especially in a data centre.

Untrue. I have filled 3 very large data centers where there was no more power to be had. Data centers are constrained by power. At some limit, you can't just spend more money to get more power.

It also becomes a cooling issue, the more power your GPUs consume, the more heat they generate, the more cooling that is required, the more power that is required for cooling. Often measured in PUE.

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As if it was just there for the taking. AMD doesn't have the money to do what Nvidia does

Yes they do. They were in the same ballpark until the past coupld of quarters. Nvidia laid the groundwork for this ages ago by developing drivers that play nice with NN. AMD could easily have done the same at the time, and can do so now. Even if it costs $1b-$10b to do it, AMD can afford it and it’s worth doing. They’ve got $55b in equity, and a huge $280b market cap to issue more stock into. [https:valustox.com/AMD]

I dunno, man.

They're releasing APUs with tensor cores right now.

They're finally getting their dogshit ROCm drivers fixed right now.

Yes, they're late. But they're definitely playing. This whole "asleep at the wheel" thing may have been true a year ago, but it's not true now.

[edit] Apologies, responded to the wrong comment, but I'll leave it here anyway.

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Nintendo is sticking with Nvidia. I'll eat my hat if they don't.

It would be just a little surprising, since so far they have a pretty bad track record with 3rd parties.

Says who, Charlie demerjian and circa-2010 AMD fanboys echoing him?

Things like Bumpgate as a major social media mindshare thing largely stem from him and his coverage. And he leaves off the part where AMD gpus were failing too (because of the same RoHS-compliant solder) and where apple kinda wanted to part ways anyway because they saw the “platform” nvidia was building and didn’t want any part of it on macOS… game knows game.

https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2021/10/13/apple-vs-nvidia-w...

That’s the problem is like the evga thing there is a distinctly contemporary take and that’s shaped by people like Charlie, and then there’s the take with the benefit of a couple years of hindsight and maybe it wasn’t exactly the way the bunnyman said it was. Maybe apple didn’t want CUDA usurping them, and maybe apple wanted to leave the way clear for the pivot to apple silicon and metal and the platform Apple wanted to build there.

The problem is the AMD fanboys are just as noxious today and - just like the evga thing - it’s gonna take years before people are willing to re-evaluate things fairly.

https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/xgn7do/we_need_more...

https://youtu.be/vyQxNN9EF3w?t=5044

There’s a little backstory like this behind almost all of the AMD fanboy “lore” around nvidia. Crysis 2 was never a thing either - the whole point of wireframe mode is seeing the full geometry at maximum LOD, with no culling, for example, and it does not happen during actual gameplay. nvidia never “sold directly to miners”, tech media didn't actually read the RBS article they were citing and it doesn't say what they say it says. NVIDIA "recently said they're completely an AI company now" stories a few months ago was a quote from 2015. Etc. There's just a group of people who just get off on hating and they don't mind making shit up if that's what it takes.

It's essentially impossible to unwind the popular opinion of NVIDIA from this ridiculous amount of past-hate... yeah, after 30 years of blood libel from ATI fanatics they probably do have an overall negative public opinion! People know the stories are true, because NVIDIA is bad, because there's all these stories, so they must be true.

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#337
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market is pricing in those tea leaves. Look at the P/E ratios of Nvidia (95) and Facebook (31) vs Apple (29) and Google (25).

PE is stupid. at least do forward PE or DCF... cmon.

Forward PE is tea leaves built on tea leaves.

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't 2x-ing their profit over the next year get the PE down to half? Why do they need to 2x their profit for a long time to come?

Half is still crazy; 1/4 is what I would consider a little high (I'm a value investor). Especially for a tech company, I don't understand the rationale behind high valuations. A high valuation makes sense to me if the asset will deliver a reliable cashflow over time, or if there's a high chance it'll start making much more cash in years to come. More reliable / more growth = higher premium. But tech companies come an…

Value investors often miss exponential/crazy growth stories.

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a 10 yr T bill isn’t risk free, what is? A shorter term US Gov bond? I mean realistically the US will just print the money it needs to pay that interest. It’s not a consequence-free decision for them, but much better than defaulting.

10Y has duration risk. 1 week T bill have no credit risk or duration risk, hence this is the risk free rate.

That's not true at all. The "risk free rate" is a theoretical concept that represents the rate of return that you can get on capital without taking any risk. No bond alone is the risk free rate. Neither is the reverse repo rate or the rate of a money market. All of these are proxies.

Re: Nvidia is now more valuable than Amazon and Google

#340

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…

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…

Market segmentation generally benefits consumers though. Enterprise is willing to pay much more than an average consumer, and they buy a lot more PCs/gpus/etc than the average consumer, so if you banned market segmentation tomorrow the response would be that gpus get a lot more expensive. You can see that happening when miners or enterprises buy up gaming gpus (which they are doing right now with 4090s for example). The clearing price wouldn't fall, it would rise.

The de-facto mechanism that's occurring with market segmentation is that consumers pay less than the clearing price and enterprises pay more. And consumers benefit from this subsidy.

If you banned it, you also wouldn't change the cost of developing new generations of products, so product development just would go slower, and the market would get even lumpier and less efficient (vendors squatting newer nodes would have an advantage, but it's inefficient to launch something immediately to compete with them, etc).

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