I think nVidia is only getting more research and development dollars because of the bitcoin craze. Its gotta be taking some of that cash and making things faster and better. Prices and hardware in short supply will quickly come down.
> Nvidia bet on a good fast growing market early on (AI)
No. Early on they realized that supporting developers for GPGPU is important, and many industries have been well served by it, starting with computer graphics and gaming.
They’re all pretty motivated, they’ve been motivated for years, and almost nothing is happening. This situation isn’t exactly a poster child for the Efficient Markets Hypothesis.
Every year just sounds like “Nvidia’s new consumer GPUs are adding new features, breaking previous performance ceilings, running games at huge resolutions and framerates. Their datacenter cards are completely sold out because they can spin straw into gold, and Nvidia continues to develop new AI and graphics techniques built on their proprietary CUDA framework (that no one else can implement). Meanwhile AMD has finally sorted out raytracing, and their consumer GPUs are… well not as good as Nvidia’s but they’re a better value if you’re looking for a competitor to one of Nvidia’s 60 or 70 line GPUs!”
The point of the economist article is that those reliably huge profit margins and free cash flows may not be so reliable in the future. Nvidia is doing a great job and has released some amazing technology.
This. Jensen (Nvidia CEO) is being a bit humble here given the massive investments the company has made into CUDA for the past decade. Now they're simply reaping the benefits. Sure, ChatGPT's arrival last year was the spark but arguably it was inevitable sooner or later.
Case in point: Nvidia has been hosting "GPU Conferences" annually to build awareness and drive adoption of CUDA. These events surely aren't free to host but necessary to build momentum and give an edge to your custom stack.
Luck is more applicable to the cryptomining boom and bust cycles that Nvidia also profited from. Their gaming GPUs (along with AMD's) just happened to be the best available at the proof of work.
I don't think many people, Nvidia shareholders included, expect this to last forever. But you make hay when the sun is shining; if VCs will pay hand-over-fist for AI-native products, then you better damn-well make sure they can buy the most expensive solutions. If they're looking for gold, you build them gaudy excavators to work in.
That being said, Nvidia is particularly well positioned to continue reaping the reward of serving the high-performance-compute market. CUDA is yet-unparalleled, and NPUs/TPUs are still struggling to make a case for themselves. If we get another cryptocurrency-style bum-rush on number crunching computers, I don't think anyone except Nvidia will be poised to immediately benefit. General-purpose GPU compute is in short supply on consumer systems, everyone wants the cloud and the cloud wants Nvidia.
Hardly , this is not about nvidia doing the foundation to make their own luck .
It is about those industries taking off in a big way.
Nvidia has zero contribution towards tranformers which was the driver behind the rise of AI or towards all the money that flowed in crypto during the low interest era.
The point has all to do with how they have been part of two cycles of boom unrelated to their product.
They are not AWS to have driven the cycle by their product itself , they have only capitalized on it with their good work .
The problem is that this now becomes a long term investment, which doesn't work out when we have CEOs chasing quarterly profits and all that. Meanwhile Nvidia stuck with CUDA all those years back (while ensuring that it worked well on both the consumer and enterprise line) and now they reap the rewards.
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