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Nvidia is the central bank of AI

economist.com

321–330 of 364 posts

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#321

> worth around $5.4trn Note that the Fed has a $6.7tn balance sheet [1]. (This is a silly comparison. But still fun.) The real comparison: Nvidia's $500+ billion of investments and commitments [2] is substantially more than any easing the Fed has done in the same time [3]. Monetarily, Nvidia is creating a lot of money in our economy. The good news: I have seen no evidence Nvidia has borrowed against its stock or othe…

All on the back of TSMC

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#322

> worth around $5.4trn Note that the Fed has a $6.7tn balance sheet [1]. (This is a silly comparison. But still fun.) The real comparison: Nvidia's $500+ billion of investments and commitments [2] is substantially more than any easing the Fed has done in the same time [3]. Monetarily, Nvidia is creating a lot of money in our economy. The good news: I have seen no evidence Nvidia has borrowed against its stock or othe…

$500bn commitments that dole out across 5-10 years and can be cancelled at any time

versus

Fed open market operations that occur in full instantly and are the primary mechanism for increasing the money supply

k.

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#323
post #296

I am a bit confused at people looking at this negatively. If Nvidia believes AI demand is extraordinarily high, and that it requires a large capital outlay to serve that capital, isn't this what they should be doing?

Except as time goes on, it becomes cheaper and hardware agnostic. Depreciation for these cards are 2-3 years, but the financing says 4-6. A lot of money is locked up into older, slower tech far longer than usual. Eventually that gets written off as customers can't buy the new stuff unless they do. You know, a pop.

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#324
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! That's very helpful as a way to discuss. First off, I'd include Qwen flash-next and GLM 5.3 to show some of the other strong open weight models, and they predictably dominate it, but they're much larger. But, it shows up right next to DSv4 Flash 0731 on the overall index, and that's much larger. It's a great model! But then scroll down and hit Time Per Task, and you'll see that DSv4 Flash takes 3.6 seconds pe…

> Qwen flash-next and GLM 5.3 to show some of the other strong open weight models, and they predictably dominate it Absolutely - no argument from me here. Bigger is very clearly a lever you can pull to get more out of a model. > But then scroll down and hit Time Per Task, and you'll see that DSv4 Flash takes 3.6 seconds per task to Qwen's 21.1 Fair point, qwen definitely is slower - it’s a dense model, 27b params, vs…

Ah good catch on the total tokens, was going off vague memory there, and I thought people had gotten qwen 3.8 27b up to similar decode speeds as ds v4 flash.

>One data point that seems relevant to me is that the previous gen qwen Qwen3.6-27b was not so different in performance from its sibling model Qwen3.6-35b-a3b. We never got a qwen3.8-35b-a3b, but if we had, would the gap have stayed the same or gotten bigger? I.e. would the quality gains by improving training coming up against a hard limitation with 35b, or not.

Yeah good question, kind of shocking that a 3b active model would perform as well as a 27b dense.

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#326

I wonder when they will give up on the gaming market because that could take down several publishers and developers. I really don't think it's an if question but a when because it almost feels like an afterthought at this point (they removed the standalone gaming revenue report from the financial reports this summer). Also I don't think AMD and Intel is capable "to step in" to replace them.

AMD would step in, they where behind nvidia but they've been closing that gap for a while and the 9070XT is the current value king (in this fucked up market) for mid-high gaming and you can actually buy them. Demand for Nvidia cards has outstripped supply even on the mid-high cards specifically because they do better with local models than AMD cards with the same VRAM do broadly. AI has completely broken the PC gamin…

Why would AMD willingly go into a low margin business with the consumer when they can focus on the enterprise? There’s currently a huge for diversification from NVIDIA because this is a long term deployment and they would rather not be beholden to NVIDIA if they can

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think is more than reasonable to be suspicious of studies funded by party with conflict of interest. Think of how many studies about climate change were funded by big polluters, for example. In 2026, the default outlook should be suspicion for any big private organisations with profit motive.

I think it’s less than reasonable to operate mainly on vibes, rumors, and hearsay. You don’t need to think about climate change studies. Instead you can read the allegedly tainted studies we’re actually talking about and profess to all of us what is wrong with them. You can’t point to exactly where they’ve fudged them.

They don't even need to fudge the data on the studies they have published. They just need to hold back other studies that contradict the idea. Pouring over the published data looking for flaws will never get us access to the unpublished data.

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#328

If Nvidia is a bank, it's an Islamic Bank. They don't take interest (usury), they share profits and risk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_banking_and_finance Imagine a scenario where the AI bubble bursts and AI companies and neoclouds go bankrupt en masse, and then a huge rebound occurs when AI has a delayed takeoff. Nvidia ends up with a massive amount of compute on its hands from its backstop deals, and it al…

The Knights Templar did the same thing, they just charged appropriate fees for every service instead of interest. Risk has to be paid for, call it interest or fees, No real difference.

And then when the kings ran out of money, they sacked the Knights and whoopsies, looks like the knights had no real money as they spent it as quickly as they could maintaining their financial network... Sound familiar?

Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI

#330

> worth around $5.4trn Note that the Fed has a $6.7tn balance sheet [1]. (This is a silly comparison. But still fun.) The real comparison: Nvidia's $500+ billion of investments and commitments [2] is substantially more than any easing the Fed has done in the same time [3]. Monetarily, Nvidia is creating a lot of money in our economy. The good news: I have seen no evidence Nvidia has borrowed against its stock or othe…

> Monetarily, Nvidia is creating a lot of money in our economy.

nvidia's money either comes from equity, or from debt. This means this money is "created" not from nothing, but from future commitments (ala, debt repayments, or promise of profits), which is not the same as what comes out of the Fed.

The Fed printing has no backing behind it - it is definitely inflationary if they do it. Investment from nvidia (or any other company) "creating money" may be productive enough to completely offset their inflationary effects - after all, the company investing demands returns from their investments, and so will only invest in things they expect to return much higher than the cost of interest (or cost of capital).

Therefore, you cannot compare Fed printing money to company investing money.

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