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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

#181

Post by consumer451 »

yugioh3 wrote: post #129
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.

My main thought was "how bad is Softbank at their job to have only been in on NVDA for such a paltry sum?"

Really living up their reputation? Or, am I way off-base here? I am just an outside observer and I would love to be educated.

Did it makes sense for Softbank to be in so little on the company "selling shovels" to all their "gold mining" investments?

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#183

Post by DANmode »

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).

Broken clock is right twice a day.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#184

Post by lisbbb »

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.

But they didn't think the Nvidia stake would make more $ otherwise they would still retain a percentage, right?

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#185

Post by IshKebab »

AnonC wrote: post #62

I personally wouldn’t put much value on this event. I’ve never been impressed by SoftBank’s investment decisions. Of course, it has a good amount of money. But its decisions on ARM, WeWork, etc., have made it seem like it’s just (uninformed/underinformed) gambling.

ARM turned out to be a good investment for them, but I think overall you're right. They haven't really done any better than index funds (as is usual).

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#186

Post by lisbbb »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #124
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #94

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. 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...

I had 250 shares I bought on a tip and sold for a decent profit then NVDA moon-shotted later that year. That's the story of my stock buying life right there.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#187

Post by thomassmith65 »

diamond559 wrote: post #163
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.

They don't see upside in Nvidia clearly or they wouldn't have completely sold out. If they don't think the risk/reward is worth it why should anyone else? Eventually you'll run out of greater fools.

Nvidia's market cap is only $5 trillion.

California's residential real estate market is $10 trillion.

All it would take for the stock to double is every last person in California selling their house and buying NVDA. /s

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#188

Post by janalsncm »

janalsncm wrote: post #134
netdevphoenix wrote: post #118

In the game of musical chairs, there is no official moment when players need to get in position to reach the closest chair. One second there is music and another second later there isn't. However, the that period exists if you can look at the relevant signs: the host hand and body in relation to the music record player. No AI player will admit to be positioning for a sector collapse but it would be naïve to believe t…

Would be interesting to have a game of musical chairs where the longer the game goes on, the more each player gets if they grab a chair. And N-1 players get a chair still.

I’m realizing this would be an interesting party game. Could probably do it with any stopwatch app. Everyone starts at the same time and holds their phone under the table, the person who presses stop last (i.e. has the highest time) gets zero points, everyone else gets a score equal to what their stopwatch shows.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#189

Post by rchaud »

esafak wrote: post #148
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.

Their goal is obviously to take a fraction of the world's economy, proportional to the productivity lift they can attribute to themselves. That's in the trillions.

How does one take a fraction of the world economy?

Microsoft sells services pretty much everywhere on earth and has a near-monopoly on PC OSes, enterprise email, productivity suites plus a giant cloud computing service....and their annual revenue last year was just $245 billion.

OAI can't get anywhere close to that, not least because they have multiple competitors and several large corporations (MSFT, Google, Meta) would rather dogfood their own solutions than use a rival's.

Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

#190

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

adastra22 wrote: post #85
chemmail wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All you have to look at is ASIC miners. Once they had them, they were 10x faster than GPUs easily and made GPUs useless for those algos. Something very similar can happen soon.

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.

No, GPUs are not a particularly ideal architecture for AI inference, it's just inference needs way more memory bandwidth than a general purpose CPU's memory hierarchy can handle.

> What does an ASIC for matmul look like?

A systolic array, and ultimately quite different than a GPU. This is why TPUs et all are a thing.

In general with a systolic array you get a quadratic speedup. For example with a 256x256 array, it takes 256 cycles to shift operations in and out, but in doing that you accomplish 65k MACs in 512 cycles for a speedup of 128x over serial.

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