Comment by spacebanana7 3 days ago
Given how the big tech companies are buying hundreds of thousands of GPUs at huge prices, most of which is pure margin, I wonder whether it'd make sense for Microsoft to donate a couple billion to make the market competitive.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-bought-...
You're probably correct, but I feel like I have to raise the issue of Zuckerberg spending a comparable amount on VR which was much more speculative.
Zuck is founder and owner. So is Huang (Nvidia CEO). They call all the shots.
Whereas AMD's CEO was appointed, and can be fired. Huge difference in their risk appetite.
I'm reminded of pg's article "founder mode": https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html
I think some companies simply aren't capable of taking big risks and innovating in big ways, for this reason.
This. Without knowing the guy, he seems to be a) very comfortable taking a lot of risk and b) it's actually not that risky for him to blow $20 billion.
There aren't many cases like this. Larry/Sergey were more than comfortable risking $10 billion here and there.
The big players are all investing in building chips themselves.
And probably not putting enough money behind it... it takes enormous courage as a CEO to walk into a boardroom and say "I'm going to spend $50 billion, I think it will probably work, I'm... 60% certain".