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The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

mohitdagarwal.substack.com

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Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#101

Post by voidspark »

makeitdouble wrote: post #99
dwattttt wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But then they're not boosting NVidia's competitors either, so wouldn't NVidia stay in the top position in their market ? Nope; if hypothetically 100% left NVidia, whether to their own hardware or to not use GPUs at all, it'd be easy to say NVidia would be last in the market

Are you arguing that the major cloud providers getting away from consumer GPUs would put AMD or Intel ahead of Nvidia in the GPU market ? How does that happen when the next biggest market (gaming) is still fully Nvidia's turf?

He's talking about datacenter GPUs which are not really GPUs.

Gaming is not entirely Nvidia's turf either. AMD has 75% of the console market (Xbox and Playstation) and 30% of the PC market.

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#102

Post by dwattttt »

makeitdouble wrote: post #99
dwattttt wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But then they're not boosting NVidia's competitors either, so wouldn't NVidia stay in the top position in their market ? Nope; if hypothetically 100% left NVidia, whether to their own hardware or to not use GPUs at all, it'd be easy to say NVidia would be last in the market

Are you arguing that the major cloud providers getting away from consumer GPUs would put AMD or Intel ahead of Nvidia in the GPU market ? How does that happen when the next biggest market (gaming) is still fully Nvidia's turf?

> Are you arguing that the major cloud providers getting away from consumer GPUs would put AMD or Intel ahead of Nvidia in the GPU market ?

Just the hypothetical "if X% of your customers leave, but don't go to competitors, won't you keep your relative market position"

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#103

Post by otistravel »

The author completely underestimates NVIDIA's strategic position. They don't need to win the hardware game forever - they're building the entire AI stack: hardware, networking, software, models, developer tools. Nobody else is doing this comprehensively. While hyperscalers are making custom chips for their own use cases, NVIDIA is building a unified platform that everyone else will use. This isn't about who makes the best GPU, it's about who builds the ecosystem that becomes the industry standard.

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#104

Post by int_19h »

adventured wrote: post #18
tintor wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their upcoming AI PC is dead of arrival since they announced its underwhelming memory bandwidth.

They'll do ~$110 billion in operating income over the next four quarters, with a mere 36,000 employees and no meaningful dividend or debt to maintain. I think they can trivially afford to keep trying if they see a market.

One interesting aspect of NVIDIA workforce that many people aren't aware of is that it's very good at retaining people. The annual turnover rate is something like 5%, and last time they had layoffs was in 2008. They are also maintaining full on remote work at the time most other big tech companies are forcing their peons into the offices.

And that buys a lot of loyalty. Which translates to productivity.

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#105

Post by Ekaros »

solardev wrote: post #57
monocasa wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And something like 90% of Nvidia's revenue at this point is from the datacenter market.

As a gamer, I selfishly wish that Nvidia would go back to being a gaming company instead of a crypto and AI compute company. I miss MSRP graphics cards :(

I also miss sane MSRPs... I thought computers were supposed to get cheaper over time, not more expensive.

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#106

Post by Jlagreen »

voidspark wrote: post #51
kadushka wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google, last month: “we’re doubling down on our partnership with NVIDIA” https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-nvidia-gtc-ai/

That's Google Cloud Platform. Of course they will provide Nvidia hardware as demanded by external customers. But their internal workloads and their frontier model (Gemini) runs on TPUs.

Yes, but the cloud customers "who finance TPUs" have NO INTEREST in TPUs and in Nvidia GPUs instead.

How does Google pay for TPUs internally? By Google Search and Google Cloud of course. Google Search uses TPUs, Google Cloud however has way more non-TPUs instances.

What people forget, nobody wants to switch from CUDA dependency to SW dependency on Google/AWS/Azure. CUDA at least allows me to use it in consumer, in pro HW, in cloud and AND in on-prem data center.

I'm really looking forward to Fortune 500 companies sending all their internal company data to Google to structure it to train custom AI models. Yeah, that will never happen. What happens instead is that Fortune 500 companies will build up AI expertise to build their own custom AI model and they will think hard if they want the training AI compute internally or on a cloud. Nvidia has a huge business of building data centers on-premises which people totally oversee. NO CSP will ever compete there because it's against their primary business model. A Reliance India contract from 2023 alone is a delivery of 2 million GPUs in a few years. That's probably more than Nvidia's last year's total revenue and that is 1 large corp in India only.

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#107

Post by Ekaros »

Fade_Dance wrote: post #59
ivape wrote: post #5

Interesting, Marvell is actually down over 50% this year. I just don't understand the bear case at all. I'm a nobody and I'm still willing to buy a $1500 gpu, and that GPU still can't do what the cloud does. The next $1500 gpu probably can't either. It feels like we're over thinking this. The hardware roll-out is all there is imho. Jensen has mentioned he sees Nvidia being a 10 trillion-dollar company, and I'm willin…

>I wonder what's stopping Nvida from releasing an AI phone It's a low margin business and would hurt the balance sheet more than the completely irrelevant revenue from a project like that. I've been investing in semi for decades and what strikes me about this recent cycle is that so many don't seem to understand that semi is a highly cyclical business that is prone to commoditization waves and inventory/capacity over…

I generally feel that many have hard time separating scenarios of company dying and going to bankruptcy and not being as profitable as before and thus being less valuable.

One is often unrealistic and later one is lot more common. And one really should consider later one in long term investments.

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#108

Post by Jlagreen »

leptons wrote: post #82
01100011 wrote: post #27

Seems like another article based on the assumption that Nvidia just sits there doing nothing while everyone who has so far proven unable to compete suddenly figures it out and steals their lunch. At some point one of these Nvidia doomers will be right but there is a long line of them who failed miserably.

Google is investing in QC quite a bit, I wonder if Nvidia has. Even Nvidia is going to look antiquated someday.

One of the most important contributors to QC is Nvidia because they try to help with GPUs in creating SW for QC and simulations. Nvidia has cuda quantum for years now.

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#109

Post by Jlagreen »

ivape wrote: post #5

Interesting, Marvell is actually down over 50% this year. I just don't understand the bear case at all. I'm a nobody and I'm still willing to buy a $1500 gpu, and that GPU still can't do what the cloud does. The next $1500 gpu probably can't either. It feels like we're over thinking this. The hardware roll-out is all there is imho. Jensen has mentioned he sees Nvidia being a 10 trillion-dollar company, and I'm willin…

Because Nvidia focuses on being a partner in each industry you mention.

See it that way, if you have an OS/SW for all the industries you mention then who is your competitor? Not the participants in that industries. Nvidia can partner with any automotive company but won't compete with any of them as long as they don't build cars. But imagine the potential of every self driving car being build using Nvidia AI?

Think about the potential of every robot build using Nvidia AI?

Think about the potential of any AI Service using Nvidia AI?

See, Nvidia isn't directly competing in the enduser market but instead focuses on the B2B. Nvidia can also create many different revenue streams from 1 customer.

For example an automotive customer: - Nvidia HW in car for AI - Nvidia data center on-prem/cloud for DriveSim in car - Nvidia Omniverse for car design and manufacturing simulation - Nvidia Isaac for robotics/logistics in manufacturing plant - Nvidia Cosmos+GR00T for robots inside the plant - Nvidia edge devices inside any robot in the plant - Nvidia NeMo data center on-prem/cloud for AI models / LLMs for internal use

And what will be the advantage? Nvidia can actually make it more and more seamless to operate between all Nvidia solutions. For example, you can do an update to your robots in Cosmos, simulate it in Omniverse and with 1 click update your Nvidia driven real robots. The alternative is that you have 3 solutions from 3 different vendors with no interface between them.

People have no idea, what Nvidia is actually creating. Nvidia has more SW engineers and even Nvidia employees call Nvidia an AI SW company. They publish so many libs and lots of other SW stuff that it's sometimes hard to keep up. Just look at all the RTX goodies for gamers which Nvidia is developing. And they are all free, well except that you need Nvidia HW for it. The same model, Nvidia will apply to ALL industries in the world. And here they discuss about CSPs being an issue for Nvidia while Jensen focuses to build a Mega Corp. which potential TAM is in every industry in the world :)

Re: The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping

#110

Post by Jlagreen »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #6
ivape wrote: post #5

Interesting, Marvell is actually down over 50% this year. I just don't understand the bear case at all. I'm a nobody and I'm still willing to buy a $1500 gpu, and that GPU still can't do what the cloud does. The next $1500 gpu probably can't either. It feels like we're over thinking this. The hardware roll-out is all there is imho. Jensen has mentioned he sees Nvidia being a 10 trillion-dollar company, and I'm willin…

Gaming GPUs is a side business for them at this point. It’s all about AI.

And yet, Nvidia innovates in gaming with SW 10x more than anyone. Strange side business it is which is also worth billions by the way.

Did you know that Nvidia has a gaming cloud running which might become the largest in the world at some time?

In 10-20 years, Nvidia might make more revenue from gaming cloud than they do today with gaming HW.

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