Comment by matwood

Comment by matwood 4 hours ago

As others mentioned, 5T isn't money available to NVDA. It could leverage that to buy a TPU company in an all stock deal though.

The bigger issue is that entering a 'race' implies a race to the bottom.

I've noted this before, but one of NVDA's biggest risks is that its primary customers are also technical, also make hardware, also have money, and clearly see NVDA's margin (70% gross!!, 50%+ profit) as something they want to eliminate. Google was first to get there (not a surprise), but Meta is also working on its own hardware along with Amazon.

This isn't a doom post for NVDA the company, but its stock price is riding a knifes edge. Any margin or growth contraction will not be a good day for their stock or the S&P.

Glemkloksdjf 28 minutes ago

Nvidia has everything they need to build the most advanced GPU Chip in the world and mass produce it.

Everything.

They can easily just do this for more optimized Chips.

"easily" in sense of that wouldn't require that much investment. Nvidia knows how to invest and has done this for a long time. Their Ominiverse or robots platform isaac are all epxensive. Nvidia has 10x more software engineers than AMD

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sigmoid10 4 hours ago

Making the hardware is actually the easy part. Everyone and their uncle who had some cash have tried by now: Microsoft, Meta, Tesla, Huawei, Amazon, Intel - the list goes on and on. But Nvidia is not a chip company. Huang himself said they are mostly a software company. And that is how they were able to build a gigantic moat. Because noone else has even come close on the software side. Google is the only one who has had some success on this side, because they also spent tons of money and time on software refinement by now, while all the other chips vanished into obscurity.

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matwood 3 hours ago

Are you saying that Google, Meta, Amazon, etc... can't do software? It's the bread and butter of these companies. The CUDA moat is important to hold off the likes of AMD, but hardware like TPUs for internal use or other big software makers is not a big hurdle.
Of course Huang will lean on the software being key because he sees the hardware competition catching up.

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- sigmoid10 32 minutes ago
  
  Huang said that many years ago, long before ChatGPT or the current AI hype were a thing. In that interview he said that their costs for software R&D and support are equal or even bigger than their hardware side. They've also been hiring top SWE talent for almost two decades now. None of the other companies have spent even close to this much time and money on GPU software, at least until LLMs became insanely popular. So I'd be surprised to see them catch up anytime soon.
  
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sanjayjc 3 hours ago

Genuine question: given LLMs' inexorable commoditization of software, how soon before NVDA's CUDA moat is breached too? Is CUDA somehow fundamentally different from other kinds of software or firmware?

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- tomrod an hour ago
  
  Current Gen LLMs are not breaching the moat yet.
  
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  fzzzy 10 minutes ago
  
  Yeah they are. llama.cpp has had good performance on cpu, amd, and apple metal for at least a year now.
  
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