But also selling ALL is a bad move, says one who sold all of Nokia at 1000 markka in 1996.
SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia
101–110 of 235 posts
Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keep in mind how severely the quality of Google search results or e.g. any consumer facing piece of Microsoft software (Windows, Office, OneDrive, etc.) have deteriorated to the point it has far transcended the more nerdy corners of the web, yet both continue to retain a strict grip, thanks to buy in/brand strength.
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.
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 reliable to the point of unusability.
Not to mention Windows is easily replaced for the truly average person who spends their entire computer use inside a Chromium browser nowadays. Outside PC Gaming (which is far from the average if we are honest), the vast majority of people never touch software that isn’t already on mobile or more likely exclusively in the browser.
Familiarity and brand strength, not need or compatibility, keep the customer facing offerings of MSFT going. That isn’t inherently unreasonable either, for these people Windows is fine as Chrome works well enough on it and they do not have any needs beyond that, so why switch. Same with search, Google still finds flights, restaurants, Wikipedia, etc.
Being better is worth little if the vast majority are sufficiently well catered to by the incumbent. Even if another OS or search may improve their experience somewhat (better reliability, longer battery life, etc.) that doesn’t trounce the established player as long as the few basics aren’t utterly broken even to them.
You can actively antagonize your users, be worse than the competition, more expensive too, you only loose most if you make the few things most have purely become reliant on and are expecting worse, basically regress.
Reason all the bugs in Windows are fine, after all the memories of most people are dominated by BSODs and just not crashing daily is enough to be considered pretty good, despite the overall experience far worse than most other OS/DE combis.
Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia
#103Note 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.
Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia
#104Related? https://www.marketbeat.com/instant-alerts/filing-curbstone-f... https://www.fool.com/investing/2025/11/11/billionaire-stanle...
Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia
#105Earlier 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.
> They have by far the strongest brand Just like Blackberry, but instead of having to buy an new device to switch to the competition, the customer just needs to click on a different website.
OpenAI is already the consumer-first AI platform. And, in my opinion, in the minds of the average consumer, the biggest one that is "an app" with memory and folders, vs. something like Gemini which is perceived as an extension of Google Search and thus doesn't have the same "knowledge database" UI.
Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't even need to invent anything. Just put in some work to polish what already exists: https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA
IMHO AMD should have done this a decade ago.
Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia
#107Earlier 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.
Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
It can be both, likely and risky, timing the market is one of the riskiest things one can do... It's likely there will be another major stock market crash, it's part of the cycle, and will always happen in its current form, good luck finding a way to time it and make a huge profit though.
Bold prediction, saying something might happen some time at some point in the future maybe but nobody knows when.
Not sure why people get so up in arms about it, signs can be seen but the timing is always the impossible thing to predict.
Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia
#109Earlier 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.
Re: SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia
#110Earlier 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.
Given how poorly Intel and AMD have fared, it suggests the hardware moat is much deeper than the software one.
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.