Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least investing in companies that will buy Nvidia makes sense somewhat, even if it feels dodgy. What possible sense does it make for Nvidia to invest in a maker of telecom equipment (Nokia) with no public plan, and the value of the investment jumps 30% as soon as it’s announced? It’s not like call routing needs to be “AI enabled” or they’re putting Nvidia GPUs in their custom silicon. Feels like Nvidia has too muc…
Nokia had some of the best mobile hardware (and software!) in the game until they were bought by Microsoft and promptly killed. I've been patiently waiting for their resurgence. Building embedded/mobile devices is their forte, which is also coincidentally the hardware space where AI is most poised to shine. Nvidia made a move in the same direction when they tried to acquire ARM. That got antitrusted (fairly so) but i…
Tech companies are firing everyone to "fund AI", spending money on each other
71–80 of 109 posts
Re: Tech companies are firing everyone to "fund AI", spending money on each other
#72Re: Tech companies are firing everyone to "fund AI", spending money on each other
#73It’s quite possible that they’d want to do the layoffs regardless, and the AI narrative just gives them a convenient excuse, with the added bonus that it also happens to promote AI.
Re: Tech companies are firing everyone to "fund AI", spending money on each other
#74It’s quite possible that they’d want to do the layoffs regardless, and the AI narrative just gives them a convenient excuse, with the added bonus that it also happens to promote AI.
Re: Tech companies are firing everyone to "fund AI", spending money on each other
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree with a lot of this. But on the last point, that’s the “blame middle management” theory. And I have seen outrageous, florid displays of exactly that behavior in those ranks. But the CEOs have been there all along, doing the math on ZIRP and getting caught up in FOMO. They could have tightened their belts at any time, or demanded better justifications for investments. Why didn’t they?
> But the CEOs have been there all along, doing the math on ZIRP and getting caught up in FOMO. They could have tightened their belts at any time, or demanded better justifications for investments. Why didn’t they? Because the job of a CEO is not to micromanage. The whole point of hiring middle management is to keep CEOs out of micromanaging decisions. The job of C-suite is to 1. Be the arbitrator between different o…
And they generally got it wrong, so they are in good company with each other. Is that because they were all equally smart? Or because they are sheep?
Re: Tech companies are firing everyone to "fund AI", spending money on each other
#76Re: Tech companies are firing everyone to "fund AI", spending money on each other
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then Nvidia is turning around and investing back in the AI companies so they can in turn buy Nvidia chips...
Nvidia is basically allowing some of its clients to pay with partial ownership of their companies instead of with cash for the chips they want, because there's simply not enough cash in them for the lofty goals lots of people think are achievable.
Re: Tech companies are firing everyone to "fund AI", spending money on each other
#78The "spending money on each other" part is untrue. It is mostly going in one direction, towards Nvidia, and that's the reason they crossed $5 Trillion in market cap recently.
I think the actual reason market caps got so high is money printing. Because there are trillions more dollars, stock markets are trillions of dollars higher. Might be a conspiracy theory though.
Re: Tech companies are firing everyone to "fund AI", spending money on each other
#79Google is not at its all-time high, but still pretty close:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb...
Amazon: similar.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number...
Microsoft: all time high?
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/num...
It sucks if you need to find work, but these are still major employers, even after large layoffs. They can lay off thousands without much of a dent.
I'm old, I remember when Google was 20k people and I thought that was enormous.
Re: Tech companies are firing everyone to "fund AI", spending money on each other
#80The "spending money on each other" part is untrue. It is mostly going in one direction, towards Nvidia, and that's the reason they crossed $5 Trillion in market cap recently.
I found John Gruber's roundup of tech company profits (not revenue) interesting: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/10/30/apple-q4-result... - Google (a.k.a. Alphabet): $35B - Microsoft: $27.7B - Apple: $27.5B - Nvidia: $26.4B - Amazon: $21.5B