Nvidia emerges as leading investor in AI companies

Re:Nvidia emerges as leading investor in AI companies by 1-6 on Monday December 11, 2023 @01:50PM (#38603756)

So all this ‘pent up demand’ for AI (as investors) is basically the company that builds the tool?

Imagine if Levis Strauss back in the gold rush days was the mysterious whale that bought most of the gold.

Could Satoshi Nakamoto be Jensen Huang?

I’m just posting silly tinfoil hat theories bit this is interesting…

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Re:Nvidia emerges as leading investor in AI companies by MPSimmons on Monday December 11, 2023 @02:24PM (#38604244)

I don't take it as this at all. I think NVidia is assuming (like the rest of us are) that AI is going to dominate the next decade or so of computing (at least?) and by investing in essentially _all_ of the independent players, they stand a good chance of backing a winning horse.

It almost turns them into VC firm more than market manipulators, imo

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Re:Nvidia emerges as leading investor in AI companies by vineyardmike on Monday December 11, 2023 @02:02PM (#38603956)

> Could Satoshi Nakamoto be Jensen Huang?

This image is really funny.

I think your Levi’s analogy is underselling it. I don’t know what % of gold income went to buying pants but I doubt it’s as high as an AI startups GPU costs. It’s really interesting that NVidia could be getting a huge chunk of this investment money back as revenue. This investment plan would probably be profitable just from driving up valuations and getting other investor’s money as sales revenue even if their equity positions go to zero.

Really though, they probably invest by giving GPUs or future-looking GPU commitments at-cost so they get equity at a discount equal to whatever margin they have in their chips.

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Re:Nvidia emerges as leading investor in AI companies by ramesh31 on Monday December 11, 2023 @02:02PM (#38603942)

> So all this ‘pent up demand’ for AI (as investors) is basically the company that builds the tool?

They make the gold, not the tool. Ounce for ounce, a wafer of top end NVIDIA chips is the most valuable substance on earth.

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Re:Nvidia emerges as leading investor in AI companies by civilitty on Monday December 11, 2023 @02:14PM (#38604111)

> Ounce for ounce, a wafer of a top end NVIDIA chips is the most valuable substance on earth.

I think that would still be Californium. Even if NVIDIA could fit 300 H100 on a 300mm wafer at $40,000 a GPU a wafer would be worth $12,000,000 which would be in the same ballpark as a single gram of Californium.

Technically anti-matter would cost orders of magnitude more but there's no demand for it so it's not really valuable, whereas Californium is tightly rationed for scientific research. </silly-nitpick>

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Re:Nvidia emerges as leading investor in AI companies by matmulbro on Monday December 11, 2023 @02:09PM (#38604056)

cringe

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Re:Nvidia emerges as leading investor in AI companies by tomatotomato31 on Monday December 11, 2023 @05:58PM (#38606670)

Invest in a startup for 1 million, get 5%, company now only buys Nvidia for 10 million and invests 10 in human.

Win win?

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