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SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

cnbc.com

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Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#121

Post by bgwalter »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #13

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.

Softbank is involved with Lutnick's Cantor & Fitzgerald in crypto deals:

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/cantor-nears-...

Masayoshi Son is BFF with Trump and Lutnick:

https://asia.nikkei.com/politics/international-relations/how...

There is more going on here than is publicly known. Investing in hot air is of course a specialty of the Trump admin.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#122

Post by gniv »

I wonder if there are people (with money) who have a really good grasp on this market (hardware I mean). For example you could have sold NVDA in August, not much lower than current price, and bought SNDK and 5x-ed your money in 3 months.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#123

Post by DANmode »

chemmail wrote: post #73
hobofan wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s going be pretty hard to dethrone Google when even Apple is going to Google for AI with another huge billion $ contract.

This year.

Apple is in the business of contracting out new-hotness until their polish is done.

Then they put their name on the thing, pretend it’s new technology – and depending on the named feature, sometimes it is!

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#124

Post by YetAnotherNick »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #94
lvl155 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably know more than us. Such as alternative chips or that the Chinese will go in-house sooner than we think. Nvidia’s moat is not as permanent as people think.

> They probably know more than us. Such as alternative chips or that the Chinese will go in-house sooner than we think. Nvidia’s moat is not as permanent as people think. This is Softbank though, they're not really noted for great investment decisions (apart from Alibaba really early on). Like, my prior is that when Softbank invest in something, the growth is done (but then I am, very much, a cynic).

Softbank had 5% of Nvidia stock just before gen AI boom. Then they sold it when it was at its lowest. If they didn't it would have covered all their losses many times over with a profit of more than 200 billion dollars.

It's just baffling they are still getting billions to spend.

[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/softbank-sells-entire-nvidia-st...

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#125

Post by ethbr1 »

bmacho wrote: post #117
ethbr1 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia's moat is their pace of performance growth, which is hardware + software + cultural. If they skip a beat, or it becomes impossible to increase performance (TSMC node stumble or P4-style dead-end), then it won't take long for someone to catch up. If they keep executing on better hardware performance + software to support it? They keep the money spigot on.

People are saying that nvidia doesn't have any moat for 20 years. And nvidia hasn't been dethroned, but grown into the largest company in the world in the meantime.

Both realities are true.

They don't have a moat... because their moat is their performance growth rate.

If they stopped today, competition would flood in. But by the time competition catches up to Nvidia today, Nvidia has moved several steps ahead.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#126

Post by hank808 »

lvl155 wrote: post #83
randomNumber7 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They probably know more than us. Such as alternative chips or that the Chinese will go in-house sooner than we think. Nvidia’s moat is not as permanent as people think.

Softbank has literally done this before. Several years ago, Softbank sold it's Nvidia stake and later regretted it to such an extent that Masayoshi Son expressed his feelings by crying. They're only selling Nvidia stock now to fulfill a prior giant cash commitment to OpenAI. Also, Nvidia is positioned to own a sizeable chunk of OpenAI.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#127

Post by mvdtnz »

hobofan wrote: post #71
nly wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to see how they become profitable enough to justify current valuations. The numbers are just mind boggling even in the optimistic scenario.

If they are able to actually successfully pivot into ads as a business model, it's very easy to justify the valuation: Just look at Google/Meta. I'm personally skeptical that they are able to pull off ads, at least on the short timescale they likely need to. They more or less have to nurture/disrupt a whole SEO industry, and the way big corps allocate advertising budgets are very slow to shift (many are still struggl…

Why should they give a fuck about the SEO industry? You think Google "nurtures" the SEO industry? They're selling ads to businesses and displaying them to consumers. SEO folks are just parasites in the system.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#128

Post by ForHackernews »

Topfi wrote: post #102
ForHackernews wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no viable alternative for either of those yet. Massive network effects around Microsoft office, and Google's only real competition is the equally-bad Bing.

Both DuckDuckGo and Kagi are, purely focused on result quality in 2025 far better than Google currently, but that does not matter if one has no need beyond the most basic results. And much of the MS Office suite is actually a worse copy of another product, merely copied and forced via network effect. There are more than enough far better alternatives to e.g. Teams and OneDrive. The latter even makes Excel far less re…

DDG uses Bing's index. Kagi costs money. But you knew that already.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#129

Post by yugioh3 »

consumer451 wrote: post #88

The surprising thing to me here is that $5.83B was their entire stake, after NVDA had gone up more that 1000% in the the last 5 years.

yeah it made me wonder what all this fuss is about. perhaps im numb to big numbers now. but $6b is a miniscule fraction of NVDA.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#130

Post by lukeschlather »

skylurk wrote: post #107
adastra22 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamentals are different. Bitcoin mining is not intrinsically suited to acceleration on a GPU. It is a not-very-wide serial integer operation. AI inference on the other hand is basically just very large floating point tensor matrix multiplication. What does an ASIC for matmul look like? A GPU.

Sorta? If that was the full story, TPU would not be a thing.

I'm not an expert in chip design by any means but I think it's fair to say that TPU is a marketing term and it's not substantially different from a GPU like an H100. H100's cores are also called "Tensor Cores."
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