Live data from Hacker News

SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

cnbc.com

41–50 of 235 posts

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#41

Note the first line: > SoftBank said Tuesday it has sold its entire stake in U.S. chipmaker Nvidia for $5.83 billion as the Japanese giant looks to capitalize its “all in” bet on ChatGPT maker OpenAI. They are switching gears, not exiting, folks.

They recognise that the larger bubble is in the datacenters.

Most of the hardware we are using was designed for computer graphics not AI. Now that China isn't buying Nvidia any longer and actively trying to get their own companies to produce hardware, what happens to all these datacenters when a company produces a device that has 80% of the performance of the current Nvidia hardware but 20% of its power consumption?

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#43

This should be the news of the day, or even should I say, the news of the last 3 years. The bubble is starting to crack.

There's no sign of cracking here:

> SoftBank said Tuesday it has sold its entire stake in U.S. chipmaker Nvidia for $5.83 billion as the Japanese giant looks to capitalize its “all in” bet on ChatGPT maker OpenAI.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#44

Note the first line: > SoftBank said Tuesday it has sold its entire stake in U.S. chipmaker Nvidia for $5.83 billion as the Japanese giant looks to capitalize its “all in” bet on ChatGPT maker OpenAI. They are switching gears, not exiting, folks.

Maybe they're trying to bail out OpenAI, but that's still not close to the amount they would need to do that. OpenAI needs like 1.3 trillion dollars.

[deleted]

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#45
post #16

Note the first line: > SoftBank said Tuesday it has sold its entire stake in U.S. chipmaker Nvidia for $5.83 billion as the Japanese giant looks to capitalize its “all in” bet on ChatGPT maker OpenAI. They are switching gears, not exiting, folks.

Selling the _entire_ stake sounds really aggressive though? Is that normal? Even if you're all-in on OpenAI, does it not make financial sense to have _some_ stake in Nvidia considering they are the only ones with an actual moat? Unless there are CUDA alternative breakthroughs we will hear about in the next few days.

Amazon’s Idaho 2Gw data center it’s building for Anthropic has 0 Nvidia Cuda cores.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-says-anthropic-will-us...

> Anthropic is using 500,000 of Amazon’s Trainium2 chips for its Claude AI models as part of the tech giant's Project Rainier

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#46
It looks more like a strategic reallocation than a panic exit. Nvidia has already delivered outsized returns, while OpenAI represents a leveraged bet on the next layer of the AI stack - software and services rather than hardware. SoftBank probably sees more upside (and influence) there, even if the risk is higher

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#47

Note the first line: > SoftBank said Tuesday it has sold its entire stake in U.S. chipmaker Nvidia for $5.83 billion as the Japanese giant looks to capitalize its “all in” bet on ChatGPT maker OpenAI. They are switching gears, not exiting, folks.

I would have thought that the OpenAI bet is way more risky, because if someone comes along with a better model it could really hurt OpenAI. NVIDIA seems harder to dethrone imo.

It's SoftBank though, weird risk taking investments seems to be their jam.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#48
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you assuming people around you automatically have the means and desire to invest their own money into risky financial instruments? This is so weird.

Risky? He said it's EXTREMELY likely. There's little risk. Margin loans are available.

>Margin loans are available.

He can still be margin called even just due to volatility in the market.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#49

Note the first line: > SoftBank said Tuesday it has sold its entire stake in U.S. chipmaker Nvidia for $5.83 billion as the Japanese giant looks to capitalize its “all in” bet on ChatGPT maker OpenAI. They are switching gears, not exiting, folks.

I would have thought that the OpenAI bet is way more risky, because if someone comes along with a better model it could really hurt OpenAI. NVIDIA seems harder to dethrone imo.

In many ways OpenAI is transitioning towards an end-user facing product business. They have by far the strongest brand among consumers and are positioning themselves to take on Google/Meta in the ad business.

By proxy, having the strongest frontier model becomes less and less necessary for them and instead building a strong product by properly layering medium-strong models in a cost-efficient way is the priority.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#50
post #11

I'm sorry, why is this on Hacker News? I'm on investing subreddits all the time, and I'd expect it there. But I don't see how this is "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." If there wasn't an AI bubble narrative, then sure, this this would gratify my curiousity. But now I don't see it, not even in the most charitable way. I'm curious what the line of thinking is on how this does, in some way, gratifi…

There is an AI bubble narrative, people are curious when it will burst. This is an indicator that people will want to analyse, discuss, and think about (intellectually).

I see. I guess I simply think that Softbank isn't a good indicator for that. To me, they don't seem better than any other investment company that puts their money into technology stocks with a growth narrative. For example, they invested in WeWork and FTX.

They don't know the future, just like the rest of us.

If we're talking indicators, if 5 Softbanks would do it in rapid succession one after another it just mentions to me that the "smart money" is showing signs of moving out.

In terms of whether AI will or will not fuel growth, I think it will fuel growth. Self-driving cars seems to be a solved problem for cities at least fairly soon (e.g. Waymo, anti-example: Tesla, camera's is not the way).

It's a question whether LLMs state of the art models will grow more, but what hasn't been done that well yet is integrating it into current software. I know, because in part, that's my job. There's still a huge productivity unlock there, also in ways that people can't fully imagine.

Right now, LLMs seem to be an enabler for software engineers, especially software engineers on smaller projects (I can't find the research at the moment, it was a while ago that I read it). It seems to be an enabler for many people, but they do need to put time into prompting it in a way that works for them.

Fixing the context window issues and others I think will be really hard tasks, because I suspect we then need to know what goes on inside the black box.

If an LLM could continuously learn, so somehow continuously keep updating its weights such that it learns better, that would be a breakthrough.

Post reply on HN