Nvidia's Risky Business • Hacker News Board

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#51

Post by bigyabai » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 5:07 PM UTC

synergy20 wrote: post #42

pletnes wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia sell iot boards with unified architecture. Would not be shocked if they launch pc/laptop/server boards at some point.

that undercuts their core business, so it will be a defensive play at most to fend off mac and amd's local inference offerings

I don't know how people can say this with a straight face. Nvidia was selling desktop-grade ARM SOCs before Apple Silicon was ever announced, specifically for edge robotics, computer vision and ML.

The absolute fastest desktop Mac GPUs cannot beat an Nvidia laptop GPU in prefill or inference speeds. Apple Silicon is a non-entity for professional datacenter deployment and arguably unusable for frontier models at agentic context sizes. AMD is Nvidia's primary worry, and they're not doing much better in terms of GPGPU SOC compute.

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#52

Post by kurthr » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 5:07 PM UTC

ekunazanu wrote: post #44

mattnewton wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think efficiency is unlikely to result in lower demand for compute, instead more useful compute per watt increases the value of that compute; and we are not going to run out of economically useful things to do with it anytime soon on the demand side. The harder thing to forecast for me is if we hit a wall on increasing efficiency, either on the model weights side or silicon side, with current approaches. If we have…

I agree; I don't think there's any reason to assume Jevons paradox won't apply. > If we have to switch to something like burning the model weights into silicon to continue to make gains I think that's already being considered semi-seriously [0][1] [0] https://taalas.com/products/ [1] https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1296/am...

What's really interesting is that if you scale it to higher densities (eg 3nm and stacked die) with ComputeInMemory for fp8 you can reasonably start to fit 30B-70B models. With MoE and multiple stacked die, just like HBM, you could fit an open weight near frontier 1T model (like GLM5.2) at similarly much lower power 2ktps. For running a bunch of agents where fill rate and speed/latency are important it may not matter that you're 6-18mo behind on weights. The process for the chip design could be largely automated, and new silicon pumped out as new weights are available (with a 3-6mo delay).

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#53

Post by grey-area » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 5:08 PM UTC

Ekaros wrote: post #50

georgemcbay wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the danger? They slide back down to being just a gaming graphics card company with a $10 share price? Nvidia dropping from being a $5 trillion company to a $242 billion company would be 1929 levels of bad. Global economy end of days stuff, especially since Nvidia can't crash that hard without a lot of other stuff crashing with it.

How much in value could Nvidia safely drop and over what period of time for it be fine for greater economy? What level of correction would be manageable? And I am pretty sure that their value will drop in 5 to 10 years.

Just for context, they make up 5% (yes 5%) of holdings in global index funds like VWRA.

https://stockanalysis.com/quote/lon/VWRA/holdings/

That is an astounding figure and means markets are highly imbalanced, unless you think Nvidia represents 5% of the global economy.

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#54

Post by maerF0x0 » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 5:10 PM UTC

jcfrei wrote: post #17

In many investment theses - like Nvidia's bet that demand for compute will keep growing - the first order assumption is usually correct. Yes, demand for more compute, chips, infrastructure is huge and each year some additional data centers will be built. Where such investment bets usually fail is in the second-order assumptions: Ie. the expectation of the growth of demand. This is where there's a high chance that the…

Plus on top of that 1st and 2nd order can be correct, but then the price is too high, meaning people lose money even if correct about the future, but over pay for it.

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#55

Post by buildbot » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 5:10 PM UTC

pletnes wrote: post #40

dzonga wrote: post #36

Nvidia has been playing a dangerous but profitable game since the Crypto boom. but now I think they probably have bitten more than they can chew. Apple already proved with their unified memory - that as long you have the capacity you can run capable models locally - thereby goes demand for inference if everyone is running some model locally. For training - Chinese models have proved that you don't need the latest & g…

Nvidia sell iot boards with unified architecture. Would not be shocked if they launch pc/laptop/server boards at some point.

Unified memory DGX Spark and RTX Spark laptops are already a thing :)

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#56

Post by coredog64 » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 5:19 PM UTC

acdha wrote: post #26

moralestapia wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nVidia will fail right after reaching an 8 trillion valuation and supplying 80% of the world's hardware! Trust me guys, it's over!

Nobody is saying they’re outright failing, but that they’re not going to be printing money the way they have been recently. Think about Intel circa 2010: most of their competitors like POWER or MIPS were marginalized, they owned the desktop and server markets with a bit of competition from AMD well contained, and their biggest desktop competitor (Apple) had just switched. A lot of analyst predictions … did not match…

> The more money Nvidia makes, the more motivated their competitors will be to get a piece of that market and the more customers will be looking for alternatives like the push into TPUs which the article discussed.

Your margin is my opportunity - Jeff Bezos

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#57

Post by Dardalus » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 5:19 PM UTC

Tend to agree with Ben's thesis RE Demis and DeepMind not really being focused on the agentic coding race. That being said, it remains to be seen whether Sergey and Koray can inspire the foot soldiers in the same way that Sama and Dario do. I'm not too optimistic, and that's to say nothing of the fact that Google cannot possibly hope to compete with these other companies on potential employee upside.

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#58

Post by dh2022 » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 5:21 PM UTC

zaphar wrote: post #45

dh2022 wrote: post #37

[flagged]

He was referencing a book that made that case if you "squint". If you read that as actually a serious "this caused world war 1" statement rather than. This looks to have gotten some dominoes rolling that may have contributed to WW1 then that says more about you than it does about the article itself.

Re: "This looks to have gotten some dominoes rolling that may have contributed to WW1 " - people who believe this should read some history about beginning of WW1. I recommend starting with "The Guns of August".

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#59

Post by dh2022 » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 5:22 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #46

dh2022 wrote: post #37

[flagged]

> Blaming some railroad bankruptcy for starting WW1 is where I stopped reading. What a weird reason to stop reading an article.

I am assuming the rest of article is as well researched as the, rather long and incredibly incorrect, introduction.

Bayesian inference and all....

Re: Nvidia's Risky Business

#60

Post by petesergeant » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 5:24 PM UTC

> The subsequent bankruptcy of Jay Cooke & Company triggered the Panic of 1873, culminating in endless railroad bankruptcies across the country, a multi-year depression, multi-decade deflation, and, one could argue, the financial conditions that made Europe, four decades later, into a tinder box.

American history education needs some dire reform.