137 points

Yes, go on, let NVIDIA buy intel. Let them buy AMD too. What could go wrong. I love monopolies! /s

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27 points
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I wonder how this guy feels when he watches everyone in the streets trying to make ends meet.

Probably feels he deserves it. :)

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14 points

He’s being doing nothing but selling his Nvidia stock so I’m pretty sure he knows it is overvalued

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7 points

He buys another leather jacket, as a treat

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5 points

I know he’s in a very extreme level of this but all of us can look at people with less than us and decide how we feel about them. It’s never even occurred to me to wonder if I deserve my paycheck - it’s just mine.

Before you say it’s not the same, you don’t have his extreme, extreme wealth, remember that some people have to start their days walking several miles to fill some plastic bottles with bad water so they can wash the underwear of the guy who rapes them.

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2 points

If I’m reading this right, you’re saying you’d understand if Huang sleeps soundly at night despite his wealth. I’ve made more money every year for 5-7 years, and I’ve never worried that I’ve become an out-of-touch rich person. For most people, becoming wealthy is gradual. And like you said, we can probably all look back at our past hardships and feel confident that we earned our paycheck.

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16 points

Oh but surely the second such an all-powerful monopoly appears, someone will start a competing company in their garage and go on to restore equilibrium /s

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117 points

This is all so normal and sustainable.

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80 points

Which means they’re in a bubble because Nvidia’s total assets (85B$) value is less than half of Intel’s (205B$). I refuse to believe that the “potential for growth” of Nvidia is worth anywhere close to 120B$ in actual value even in the next 5 years. I see only two things here: either Intel is undervalued, or Nvidia is overvalued. I think it’s both. When that bubble bursts it’s going to hit very hard for a lot of people because it’s the same thing as the other big tech companies (apple google meta etc) are all valued based on predictions and magic when the companies that have an actual intrinsic value are worth less

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26 points

Seems the strategy is clear mega short nvidia to buy super leveraged intel and hope you can stay solvent longer than the market is irrationnal

I agree this is an obvious market failure because finance bros have become detached from reality even more than usual.

AI boom is starting to smell like DOT COM 2.0.

We have not seen that much improvement since gpt4, mostly cost reduction and UI convenience.

Current AI hype is not cashable, and I say that as an enthusiast who is building 15 kilowatt inference cluster in his living room.

We already have the major improvements already and we are nowhere close to done disgesting then.

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4 points

Strategy unclear, I’ll still Bogle HODL.

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3 points

Nana would be proud

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2 points
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The problem with shorting is that it’s not clear when the crash will happen. If it happens next week, yes, you’ll make a giant fortune doing that. If it happens in a year, you’ll be fucked. Shorting is essentially a loan, and like any other loan, you have to pay in a little something for as long as you’re holding it. That can sap away all profit before you ever see it, if not sap away your entire savings.

There’s a saying around the stock market: the market can be irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

That said, I do think this crash is happening sooner rather than later. I’m just not confident enough to put money on it.

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0 points

OK, what about this, implement the strategy and then, trigger war between Taïwan and China. They already want ont so bad, if for instance some Chinese war ship got its bridge blown up by a missile full of western electronic components while they were harrassing some fishermen in the straight. Since they’re already looking for an excuse, they might not need any further explanations to do what they were already going to do. It worked with the Maine and the Maddox and many other times in history.

Nvidia would probably cease existing without cheap Taiwanese labour to do all theoretical work for them so those shorts could be free money. A free trillion dollar just ready to be picked for one false flag attack, which, these things already happen all the time so, no big deal.

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10 points

How is Intel’s market cap less than their total assets?

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14 points

Debt, both on-the-books and anticipated.

Intel’s investments in the Titanium chipset have effectively dead-ended. They can’t get below 7nm efficiently. Meanwhile, you’ve got companies in Taiwan, Korea, China, and Japan breaking into the 3nm and 2nm scales. To catch up, they’re looking at hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars in technical debt.

Yes, they can keep churning out existing processors at huge profits in the moment. But the face value of these processors plummets with every new step in Moore’s Law. This amounts to asset depreciation, which means Intel’s value is heavily overstated on the basis of asset cost alone.

I won’t argue that NVIDIA is overvalued. But I think the degree to which they are overvalued is often misattributed to speculation and avoids the real specter haunting the company… competition. NVIDIA’s market dominance and the escalating demand for their technology means the sky really should be the limit for their growth. Demand for AI processing is at the forefront of these expectations. But a rival manufacturer capable of cutting into demand for their units would dramatically undermine their profitability.

Its the same with firms like Microsoft and Facebook and Boeing. So much of their dominance is predicated on the theory that people will never leave these walled gardens and their margins being enormous purely because they controlled a critical commodity/patch of technical real estate.

There was - incidentally - another enormous company that seemed to have the market cornered in its industry and got complacent with its R&D and long-term investment strategies… Intel.

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3 points

Meanwhile, you’ve got companies in Taiwan, Korea, China, and Japan breaking into the 3nm and 2nm scales.

The mainland Chinese SMIC is doing everything they can without access to ASML’s EUV machines, and have gotten further than anyone else has on DUV. It remains to be seen just how far they can get without plateauing on the limits of that tech. Most doubted that they could get past 10nm, but some of their recent chips appear to be comparable to 7nm, and there are rumors that they have a low yield 5nm process that isn’t economically feasible but can be a strong political statement.

TSMC is delaying the transition to Gate All Around, announcing that they won’t be trying it on the 3nm processes, and waiting until 2nm to roll that out. They’re the undisputed leader today, so they’re milking their current finFET advantage for as long as it will sustain them.

Samsung has already switched to Gate All Around for their 3nm process, so they might get the jump on everyone else (even if they struggled with the previous paradigm of finFET). But they’re not lining up external customers, as their yields still can’t compete with TSMC’s. It’s entirely possible though that as the industry moves from finFETs to GAAFETs, Samsung could take a lead.

Intel basically couldn’t get finFETs to work, and are already trying to skip ahead to GAAFETs (which they call RibbonFET). Plus Intel (like the others) is trying to introduce backside power delivery, which, if it can be commercialized and mass produced, would achieve huge gains in power efficiency. Intel did introduce both technologies in its 20A process (supposedly 2nm class), but then canceled it due to low yield. So they’re basically betting the company on their 18A process, and hoping they can get that to market before TSMC and Samsung hit their stride on 2nm.

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2 points

Right. Liabilities. Frick. Thank you.

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5 points
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Fear mongering articles making it seem like they are doomed and will go bankrupt after bad quarterly results were announced. Articles were probably sponsored by rich people wanting to buy Intel stock for cheap. But they won’t go bankrupt because the US gov./army need Intel to stay relevant against China, and Intel is basically the only American company that both designs and fabs their own processors and that is still relevant.

That and the fact that Nvidia is over valued (they are valued at 30x the value of their assets).

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3 points

But they won’t go bankrupt because the US gov./army need Intel to stay relevant against China, and Intel is basically the only American company that both designs and fabs their own processors and that is still relevant.

That’s never stopped anyone from going bankrupt and wiping out shareholders. If the tech is that critical, the US government might engineer a bailout of the company, but will make the shares worthless in the process.

They did it with GM and Chrysler in 2009, they did it with Iridium in 2000.

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3 points

thirty times???

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4 points

In the same way that a normal person can have a net worth less than the value of the house they own: debt and illiquidity.

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1 point

Well, while outstanding in current (we are living in a 20++ year bubble without much correction - no, when market values/indexes/cap rebound within a year, or month, with mostly the same main players) times, and especially for a successful company in the tech sector, having more assets than market cap isn’t that weird.

As long as market value is above book value, it’s fine.
And when it’s not, it’s prob a bank after 2012 (tho prices are generally way closer to book than they were before) :D.

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10 points

Intel is lagging behind AMD and NVidia with no sign of catching up. Meanwhile NVIDIA has a monopoly on AI.

It’s no wonder NVIDIA is worth far more now.

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5 points

Intel have shown signs of catching up by putting out a better iGPU than AMD’s latest and greatest for laptop chips in certain games and most compute tasks. They’ve also put out one of the best laptop chips last month, they consume next to nothing while still having decent performance but go on I guess

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3 points

Being best in one aspect of the laptop market is not going to save Intel. They are losing their grip on the server market. That’s where the real money is, and once those customers go AMD, they are likely to stay there for the foreseeable future.

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3 points

Aren’t the best handhelds using AMD iGPU’s? The MSI Claw didn’t exactly leave a great mark. The new Radeon 890m looks pretty killer for its power efficiency.

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4 points

Intel has made some major strategic errors and may not be able to bounce back. At least, they won’t bounce back with the company looking the same as it did. Their fabs need to be spun off to an independent subsidiary–which is apparently already underway–which will eventually be spun off entirely like AMD did with Global Foundries. The remaining company focuses on engineering. The resulting company won’t have the same assets, but could potentially get them back to doing good work.

AMD’s chiplet design has proven to be the way to go, and Intel has been struggling to replicate it across their entire lineup. I can get into the details of how genius it is, but suffice it to say that it lets AMD be extremely responsive to changes in the market in ways that were never possible before.

So is Intel undervalued? I don’t think so. The market has decided their problems are so negative that it drags down the company below what their direct assets are actually worth, and the market is probably right. However, this is not a death sentence, and there are ways that the company can go on.

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2 points

Is that why AMD is able to bring out those new amd4 chips for gaming even though they’d moved onto am5?

Or was that just amd having some am4 capacity left?

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1 point
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A little of both. The node that those am4 chips are running on is cheap, so why not?

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50 points

If this is all Nvidia stock let him try to cash out and see what happens.

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45 points

The thing that bothers me when people say “oh its unrealized gains, it’s not real money” is that they use those unrealized gains as collateral for loans of real money. They effectively ARE that rich.

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10 points

It’s BS that you can borrow against it. If he did sell it the valuation would drop.

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12 points

As far as I’m concerned, that’s the point at which unrealized gains should be taxed: as soon as you’re using it as leverage

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4 points
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Deleted by creator
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12 points
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With money they loan from a bank, using whatever they bought with the previous loan as collateral.
It’s credit all the way down.

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1 point
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Banks don’t take this into consideration when assessing collateral?

Lol, who downvotes a question?

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8 points

There are completely different rules when you are that rich. Look at Trump, he bankrupted how many businesses and banks STILL lined up to loan him money. At the very top, your trading favors and power.

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2 points

Take what into account? They basically look at current valuations and offer loans up to some fraction of that amount.

And that’s generally the way the ultra-rich operate, they don’t actually sell anything, they just borrow against their assets. They punt the can down the road until they die, at which point those unrealized gains get stepped up in basis for those who inherit it. If you have enough stock assets, you can service the debt with the capital gains you’re forced to realize (i.e. dividends).

So the bank sees someone with $100B in assets asking for a $10M loan or whatever, and they’re completely happy to offer that, because even if the stock gets cut in half, he can still pay the debt.

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33 points

You dont need to sell your stocks to access that wealth. You can use that as collateral to take loans or exchange stocks.

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20 points
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“unrealized gains” that you can somehow live off of indefinitely.

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13 points

Elons everything comes from having overpriced tesla stock as collateral

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12 points

LOL

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1 point

In case anyone was curious - the avg daily turnover of nvda is 300 to 350 million moneys.

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47 points

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