@ErickaSimone it's really annoying how well that strategy worked even though everybody could plainly see it
like, it forced us to process that big institutional investors see this stuff as intended behavior. this is what the market means to its strongest proponents.
@ireneista @ErickaSimone So this is actually one level further than I had expected.
I thought nvidia was building GPUs as fast as they could *and selling them to hyperscalers* who were then sitting on them unable to build DCs fast enough to house them.
This article sounds like they were not actually even selling a lot of the GPUs.
@ireneista @ErickaSimone Like, my impression of the situation was that nvidia was selling shovels in a gold rush and the gold miners were the ones who were going to get screwed in the end, but that they actually did in fact have sales and that the GPUs had been manufactured, paid for, and changed hands.
@ireneista @ErickaSimone I thought the bubble was gonna pop and nvidia was gonna be sitting on a hoard of cash and everyone else was going to be screwed.
It's now sounding like they might not be in as good a position as I had predicted. I thought they would be the only one left standing when it all came down.
@azonenberg @ErickaSimone greater-fool scam. everyone involved in such a thing wants to believe they're the ones taking advantage of the others
@azonenberg @ErickaSimone there was a time early on when we thought nvidia would be doing well, but then it turned out they were subsidizing their own customers...
@ireneista @azonenberg @ErickaSimone
probably because they considered their market cap more important than actual income
inflating the bubble was more important than making actual money
should've been obvious that this can't work out forever, but I guess they were blinded by greed
@Doomed_Daniel @ireneista @ErickaSimone what ever happened to the idea of building a sustainable business model that makes a profit providing a useful service or product people actually want, not growing to a scale you can't manage or demanding growth for the sake of growth, etc
@azonenberg @ireneista @ErickaSimone
that would be nice, wouldn't it..
can't do that when publicly traded, though, if some shareholders or analyst wankers think you're not growing fast enough or whatever you're screwed, no matter if your business is otherwise sustainable or not
@azonenberg @ireneista @ErickaSimone
(note that this isn't meant to *excuse* their scam, just highlight the mechanisms that cultivate this kind of megalomania and greed)
@Doomed_Daniel @ireneista @azonenberg @ErickaSimone honestly, it's still only a bad move for them if they are likely to face personal consequences for their actions.
Huangs crime is disloyalty. If he gets done for the grift, it's a by-product of that.
@azonenberg @ireneista @ErickaSimone nvidia have absolutely exorbitant margins on these things right now. they can cope with a big pile of these deals going bad.
more existentially for them, they want to make sure they have customers who aren’t OpenAI and Anthropic. honestly it kinda reads as if they are screwing their firmer customers (hyperscalers, big ai cos) by locking in high prices to make bets on their up-and-coming competitors.
and in the process maybe inflating their stock price a bunch
@azonenberg @ErickaSimone @ireneista now i think it is very fair to say that nvidia probably overextended their market position. their margins make it easy to compete with them, and if you’re doing large scale inference other vendors are really fucking attractive right now.