I don't think it's good for Nvidia if everyone has to go through a few labs APIs to get access to AI inference.
It makes sense to me why they would benefit from chinese labs having more compute.
Their P/E ratio is lower than in 2020 (before AI got rolling, and way below their 2023 peak.
If anything - based on current sales alone - NVDA is undervalued.
If (it’s a big if), NVDA get leapfrogged in hardware capability it will be trivial for the next generation of deployments to stop using them entirely (Google and Microsoft are already developing custom inference chips, as are others)
The same story goes back for years and years in consumer hardware too. AMD GPUs often had more raw compute capability, but fell short in actual game performance (or other applications).
Nvidia's moat is, at least partially, the software to make the hardware useful.
The hyperscalers are one story but research/consumer/“Everyman” inference is likely very different.
i would like to, but won't/can't buy their overpriced crap -> they're losing a customer -> they're doing something wrong -> their valuation is just about 0 to me, ballpark estimate
The main competitions US labs are facing, are from one another at this point, not from open weight models. If anything, the competition from new entrants in the west (Meta, xAI, even Google if you think about it) has pushed things even faster, but regardless, I don’t see how OpenAI and Anthropic would have been any slower if there were no open weight models.
That is something they simply cannot do with Chinese entities. Allegedly smuggling GPUs may be feasible, but that'd probably ruffle to many feathers in both the US and Mainland China, especially as we know they will pop a bubble to their own (temporary) detriment if it gets out of control as seen with Evergrande a few years ago.
Nvidia would rather sell those big interconnected gpu racks than individual GPUs.
> I don't think it's good for Nvidia if everyone has to go through a few labs APIs to get access to AI inference.
Maybe but isn't a business customer better for Nvidia than regular customers? They buy in bulk and commit to multi year purchases. Bonus points for circular deals
Would that not perhaps hurt their product ecosystem? What if people decide they don't want so much of one product, and would actually like to buy some of those cancelled products at some point in the future? I guess they'd have to go to a different company then!
The only person that should be able to fire him is their spouse and only of their mariage/relationship.
Why was it wrong of Weinstein to proposition possible actresses working?
It’s not hard to see that if you’re on a position of power over someone you must keep it professional.
In the case of Weinstein, they identified as victims.
Brining the conversation back to context, no such case has been proven for Jensen.
In most juridictions there are laws against abuse of authority which applies if it is the case. How well they are enforced is a different matter but unless there is a victim I don't think there is a problem.
It is usually frowned upon in companies because of the complications that arise when people are dating.
For example it risks confidential information leaking or projects being delayed due to relationship dynamics.
Those statements sound different today, but I think they are both commercially reasonable desires and follow naturally from his very successful playbook over the last twenty years: CUDA built that company. Or at least got it to its first trillion.
In effort for us to see clear eyed, it would be good to stop assuming someone is a spy without a shred of credible evidence. Avoiding trade restrictions by routing them through another country does not indicate spy craft.
Their main problem is not the lower efficiency, but the limited capacity of production, caused by the fact that they cannot buy SOTA manufacturing equipment.
This will indeed slow them down for some time, but it is likely that sometime between 2030 and 2032 they will become able to use EUV lithography in mass production, eliminating the principal advantage of US companies like NVIDIA. After that, they will no longer be constrained by the capacity of production for GPUs and CPUs.
I consider rather doubtful that USA will possess advanced AGI before that.
Even with the smaller amount of GPUs that they can use, I do not see any sign that they will trail by much the AI research from USA.
They will build this capacity anyways, delaying them to 2030 would be a massive win.
I don't know what your definition of "advanced AGI" is, but if it's the target for a final "win" to the AI race, I think you need to reassess what the current capabilities really are, we're still in the infancy or toddler stages of AGI at best. You should also take a look at how fast Chinese labs are closing the gap, with greater efficiency compared to US labs.
The US mindset of abundance and "scaling laws" is not going to have them win the race. It's not a sustainable strategy.
We've seen the results of this just this year when its turned out China has enough oil reserves to buffer the reduced output from the Iran war. China had been bringing in Iran/Venezuela/Russia oil for years despite U.S./EU sanctions. That's not spy craft. That's China looking after itself and not bowing to western hegimony.
Nobody apart form US has issue with current China - if folks in US are getting the idea from US media that whole world is on some jihad against China thats laughable - nope its just US, yet another failed effort that will backfire way worse than doing nothing, ie like Iran. We don't want part in that. China is not expansionist unlike russia, it doesn't have that desperate need to promote their regime and way of doing things on whole world and murder anybody rejecting it. This fearmongering is simply not working outside US borders.
Now in the past there were many gentlemen agreements between nations plus the risk of aircraft carrier group coming your way or getting kicked out of SWIFT network, but that has been overused recently so nobody cares that much.
* US intelligence agencies reportedly monitored Alice Huang for over a year and concluded she was passing information directly to Beijing.
* A memo overseen by Marco Rubio reportedly concluded that China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) recruited her to gather intelligence on Jensen Huang and potentially influence Nvidia's chip exports.
* The FBI reportedly warned US lawmakers nearly a year ago that she might be supplying information to China.
* She was a director and controlling shareholder of Megaspeed, which US authorities investigated over suspected diversion of restricted Nvidia chips to China.
In the spy world, this is about as close to irrefutable evidence as it gets. We know that any strategically important or large company in China requires Party members in positions of authority inside the company. The CCP exerts direct power over these companies in a multitude of ways. Megaspeed is a clear example of the kind of company they oversee. To assume anything other than Megaspeed being in clear cooperation with the CCP would be a rejection of everything we know about how companies operate in China.
* She was a director and controlling shareholder of Megaspeed, which US authorities investigated over suspected diversion of restricted Nvidia chips to China.
I would not be surprised if Alice Huang and others were coordinating chip purchases through financing backed by the China government. But that's not spying. Thats just business.
I think you've made up your mind on this matter and you're not going to let reality get in the way.
My point is simply what I said at the beginning of this thread: "In effort for us to see clear eyed."
NVIDIA is the undisputed champion of AI hardware because of the advanced chip node access ban, ensuring no Chinese competition in this area for years. In return NVIDIA was banned from selling their chips to China so that the US holds the state of the art in AI models as well. Selling chips through back channels is a betrayal, spies or not.
Yes, with or without approved transfer of tech to China, China will eventually catch up. Would you rather this eventual tech normalization happen through a process of growing animosity or respectful cooperation?
I don't have a dog in this fight on specifics regarding Nvidia chips. People on all sides will respond as they see fit.
False dichotomy. We have plenty of examples of selling tech to China which eventually leads to the opposite of respectful cooperation. I'm not anti-china but it has nothing to do with any of this. What was the point of bringing it up, it doesn't make your argument any more compelling. It's not within the expected logical standard that is expected on HN.
Let's get back to the original point that you made, which is parroting the idea that selling leading technology somehow prevents China from accelerating their pursuit of it. Do you have any evidence of that working?
Sure - jet engines. China still can't replicate the material for turbine blade and has to buy them from other countries.
They've had decades from the first aircraft sales to do the R&D to make their own blades. They've failed so far.
I am not entirely sure I buy the Spy thesis. And Alice's husband knew this all along. Which makes the whole thing more doggy.
And Jensen's view isn't wrong. There is no way you could contain China via import restrictions. Not when they are the second-largest economy and still rapidly advancing. There are better ways to handle this, one huge ban isn't one.
But I wholeheartedly disagree with ousting Jensen. And given the timing of all these releases, I wouldn't be surprised someone inside the government wants to bring him down.
Do you know how difficult it is for a company to expand their business to new markets? Do you know difficult it is the build up a customer base in a market?
This isn't just doing addition and subtraction on n GPUs/year. This is business. We wouldn't have so many businessmen if business was that simple.
This is exactly how it played out, too, which is why Huawei chips have started taking inference workloads in China and we're now starting to see them in training too.
1) buying B100s by the palette with 15 years of stable work on CUDA, or 2) some rinky-dink Huawei chip that's 3x slower, no software framework and crashes 50% of the time?
It's a no-brainer. If there were no export controls, Nvidia would be taking all that oxygen out of the room. Chinese chip efforts would be put back by at least 5 years, and probably more like 10.
Sure, they might get there eventually but Nvidia would still have that lead when they do.
> 1) buying B100s by the palette with 15 years of stable work on CUDA, or 2) some rinky-dink Huawei chip that's 3x slower, no software framework and crashes 50% of the time?
Whichever one the CCP representative on your board tells you to do. You don't get a choice on things like this.
There's no way having the option of buying chips from Nvidia would have hurt China. You can't bait them into acting against their own interests by giving them stuff. If the harm to the domestic chip industry would really outweigh the benefits, the CCP would issue the order and no-one would buy the Nvidia chips and that would be that.
Clearly untrue, because many companies are using the gimped H20s and the full H200s (both legally imported or smuggled) despite official government policy being silicon-self-sufficiency. It's a bit more complex than "CCP issues order and everyone immediately falls into line".
> There's no way having the option of buying chips from Nvidia would have hurt China.
I'm not saying it "hurt China", I'm saying there's a fine line to tread between supporting Chinese AI models now, at the expense of the Chinese silicon industry in 20 years' time. The US export ban forced the issue and took the alternative off the table.
Generally this does work. China is pretty resistant to it as countries go.
See how difficult it is for the US Chip market to get off the ground, because it is so easy to just buy from other countries. A government directive to "Build It", only goes so far. So the Chinese Gov directing its companies to build chips, would have headwinds if Nvidia chips were available.
You can get like 200% margin on selling GPUs to PRC smugglers in Taiwan. It's a very busy industry with lots of players so the margin gets spread around. Recently a big ring of them was busted and sent to prison here so most people try to have as many middlemen between them and the guy that puts it on the boat as possible, because apparently the prison sentence is quite long.
I had someone offer me 10x whatever I bought for (not even MSRP just whatever I paid) for "as many GPUs as I could get my hands on." I asked hundreds? Yeah. Thousands? "Can you get us thousands???" It's fuckin nutty.
But I wholeheartedly disagree with ousting Jensen. And given the timing of all these releases, I wouldn't be surprised someone inside the government wants to bring him down.
Finally, because he's of Han Chinese origin, I bet they thought they could get the media to coordinate a narrative around him that will force him out. Of course, he sort of made it easy to pin something on him.
That’s what I think it’s going on… the “allegations” are ridiculous at best. He is the most “normal” of the bunch by a long short.
"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court."
Like, internal Nvidia KYC policy changed per Huang to facilitate GPU sales to Megaspeed.
Whether or not he realized it, cared, or was aware and doing it on purpose, he was acting as an enormously powerful lobbyist and influencer on the US as an agent of China.
If only the economist was equally "concerned" about other CEO misconducts...
He's operating in a highly charged political environment in which his credibility is a key asset. He can't effectively advocate for NVIDIA's interests if his credibility is damaged.
And this goes directly to his credibility on the most politically charged issue of all: The geopolitical rivalry between the US and China, and NVIDIA's role in it.
I agree it's a tragedy for NVIDIA, he seems to have been exceptional as a CEO, it's just too late now.
As far as I can tell, most of the reports were just recounting factual information. The narrative was already there. The media didn't create it.
This X post makes a lot of sense: https://x.com/antfeedapp/status/2120454507448651933
What do you mean by "this"? One thing I agree with is that we knew about this story for months. I've read about Jensen's affair with Alice Huang and her ties to the Chinese government at least five months ago.
The thing that triggered the current reporting was the new sourcing about U.S. intelligence findings that came out in late October. So mainstream news started reporting on it once they had sources they found trustworthy.
The confusing thing, though, is not that the story suddenly became big, but why it didn't become big much earlier.
Did they ever find the uranium in Iraq? Good luck with those guys.
Whenever I see these kinds of stories I think of this, written a century ago:
Hanlon's razor seems to apply here, so I don't really think it's a psyop. Simply information many (top secret) parties were aware of for a while that other people who are incentivized to tell everyone eventually caught up on.
I'm tired of hearing hanlon's razor tossed around. How about the inverse: I attribute malice if doing so makes the system better and explains your behavior. Even if you are just a fool, your actions impact others and have the same consequences of malice. I hold you to account like a criminal if you act like one.
I recommend watching it if the power of media interests you.
They could have easily just waited a month or two and let this all just go away.
It's the outside pressure.
Does it just come down to virtue signaling pressure?
- He is married and had multiple affairs
- He slept with a subordinate
- He slept with a business partner
- He was compromised by a Chinese spy
These are all just facts - the narrative writes itself.
I think whoever is next will not always have the affinity for gaming. Any finance person who looks at the unit economics of gaming would conclude that they should allocate next to no chip supply to gaming GPUs.
An RTX 5090 is the same die size as a server GPU.
An RTX 5090 is a reticle sized chip.
nvidia got their strong position in AI now by providing CUDA to researchers who couldn't afford their own supercomputing cluster. and now the entirety of machine learning revolves around CUDA.
once you fixate on the business and lock out the masses, you instantly elect to become a fossil like IBM.
> WSJ reports that details of the affair were known to top officials, including SoS Rubio and CIA Ratcliffe, “going back to last year,” and were brought to President Trump; the administration took no action to blacklist Megaspeed.
Does this this sound like people who want to bring him down or people who wanted to protect him?
Is it so unreasonable to expect American tech companies to 'ignore' the market of a country that is supplying materiel to the countries that America is currently engaged in a proxy war, and actual war with?
If not, exactly what would China have to do for this to be a reasonable expectation, and something that we would expect American companies to do under their own volition?
What the fuck are you talking about - it's obvious this guy broke the export bans - the affairs are just a media circus to distract from that fact - not only should he be ousted he should be going to jail if there's any sort of legal system in the US left...
This isn’t about right or wrong. If he knowingly broke the law he should be punished.
There are a few major differences. Apple's devices aren't under export control so Apple takes no risk selling. Nvidia had to take legal risks to do this.
On the stock side, Apple devices are almost never supply constrained. Nvidia's never get to sit on the shelf. Nvidia can jack up the prices to the sky and still not keep up with demand.
Between these 2 things, the risk to sell to China looks like more than only profit motivated.
China has all the incentive in the world to disrupt a major US AI firm to slow the US down.
Pretending there was no China revenue books?? That's an insanely huge financial lie
Absolutely. Since the midterms, many politicians see going after Jensen as a way to appease the pitchfork mobs of anti-AI/data center voters (it doesn't matter if that position makes no sense).
So was Huang playing along as part of some other US-Chinese plot?
Was he a pawn, or go-between, in US-Chinese relations.
Maybe the cheating was a cover, or pawn with benefits?
It may be the case that his ouster helps certain people. That has nothing whatsoever to do with how the blame should be apportioned or what the sensible course of action is.
That she is a "foreign agent" is not an established fact whatsoever. Sure does make for a good headline though, especially if you want to oust Jensen.
- he lied about one affair
- the other one was with a direct subordinate
BK fafo’d at Intel with a report and that was that.
Jensen seemingly took that as a challenge and doubled down.
If this level of ego is what’s necessary for this system to thrive, let it all burn to the ground.
There are many regulations, sanctions and restrictions I disagree with. That doesn’t mean I can or should try to bypass them on a large scale.
He may have been right, doesn’t mean he gets to break the law.
And then news came out that he was having an affair with a direct-report. Unfavorable and pretty unforgivable even before the spy story.
Why not CEOs at $73B market cap companies? And increase it with inflation?
I assume that "what they used it for" means "what they could do after they pwnt the computer in the TV". If that's what you meant, then _if_ there is at least one reasonably easy way to pwn the computer in that TV without really requiring interaction from the TV's user, then it's 110% fair to not extremely clearly distinguish between what the TV does out of the box and what it has the capability to do. Why? Because if it's easy to pwn, then it's likely to already be pwnt.
But. Even if there wasn't a reasonably easy way to pwn the TV, I'd say that it's still very fair to not extremely clearly distinguish between what the thing does now and what it can be made to do, because what it does tomorrow is up to the manufacturer... which has pretty clearly demonstrated that they give zero shits about the privacy of the purchasers of their consumer-grade TVs. Inevitably, the manufacturer will make the TV do everything it can do in order to continually squeeze as many pennies from that initial sale as is possible.
> People who care about hardware reviews have to go somewhere else.
You've probably missed the handful of videos where Burke is all like «We'd love to review hardware, but it's so damn expensive that no one can really buy it. Why spend time reviewing things that people can't really buy? So, we investigate this stuff because it's informative and important.»
But yeah, GN doesn't do many hardware reviews these days.
I also pray* that said reality has not breached an event horizon; blotted from the known universe, never to be seen again.
*figuratively
- https://www.youtube.com/@GamersNexus/posts 1 day ago.
Society should not tolerate powerful man taking advantage of powerless woman!
Because a good exec plans long-term. Presidents and political parties in office are temporary. It takes much more to get a foothold in the market.
The question you have to be asking is why was the memo leaked now and what political game are they playing.
In terms of ousting him - I know nothing about him as a person - but he has lead Nvidia for 30 years during which time it has wildy succeed in not an easy market - whatever this is about, it's not about competence.
Which suggests the formal assessment is it wasn't - they were investigating Megaspeed for sanction busting via chip smuggling, happened to notice the affair, and found nothing concrete.
Note sanction busting by buying lots of Nvidia chips and renting them to Chinese companies is perfectly legal ( and very lucrative ).
So that's the evidence about the security situation.
The real question is why leak the memo to the press now - and I don't pretend here to know the answer.
Has it crippled their AI charge? No. Hindered perhaps - but things like the rental loophole show how stupid it was.
What is has done is supercharge the internal chinese chip market ( which has endangered NVidia's global dominance ).
For example:
Where is the evidence that nobody in the security services did not know ? There is already history where Security services are not independent, and stuff that will be investigated depends on the current gouverement, what the timing of the leak seems to suggest.
Wake me up when that changes to actual spy.
Also turns out this wasn't the only affair the CEO had and it's not suggested the other woman was a spy.
The only reason not warn him would be:
1. There isn't a reason to.
2. You suspect him as well and want to monitor further.
There is no evidence of the latter ( either him being a knowing collaborator or him being directly monitored ).
I am with you until here. Since cuda they have had a strangle hold on the market. It's like Pepsi vs R.C. Cola, their nearest competitor is miles behind.
NVDA stock lost hundreds of billions of dollars. Erased ALL gains from the last year, and there are at least four or five materially significant investor information, that NVIDIA should have disclosed as risk to investors and did not.
For a company with 4 Trillion in stock market value, this is an absolute wet dream for the lawyers who specialize on this type of lawsuits.
And its telling that even Trump basically refused to back him, and said the FBI is investigating and "he hopes there is nothing there..." what is telling, so there is a lot. So he is gone. Its just taking time for the board to find a CEO.
So the affair is going on for 3 years...and it was her husband that made the introductions [1].
Trump, Rubio and the security community knew about this for at least one year, and knew NVIDIA was in all likelihood, engaging or tolerating criminal activity on violating export controls that come with a few years of prison.
Look at this [2] excellent work from Bloomberg. For Jensen Huang as a dual Taiwanese and United States citizen, to completely ignoring what is going in the South China Sea, the Chinese threats of invading Twain, and be so forthcoming on saying "China is not our enemy" like you see here: https://youtu.be/JW5s9Md4U2U?t=1058
While failing to disclose a relationship with CEO of the main company traffic forbidden NVIDIA GPUs to China, shows a recklessness that probably meant to side observers of the intelligence community, he had to justifiably be taken down.
And its telling this is a takedown from withing the government and the intelligence community, because most is coming from the New York Times. They seem to be ahead of everybody else, and is well know it has always been a mouthpiece of the US intelligence community when they want to leak something convenient.
[1]-"A Mystery Businessman Introduced Jensen Huang to His Paramour. It Was Her Husband." - https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/a-mystery-businessman-introduced...
[2]-"The Rise and Reckoning of Jensen Huang" - https://youtu.be/JW5s9Md4U2U
"For the same price" may be an incorrect assumption. The middlem[ae]n in the smuggling process could have been willing to pay a higher price to Nvidia because the final destination customer (the Chinese government?) was willing to pay a premium.
He wanted to make sure that all the open source AI tooling is as married to CUDA at the hip as it could possibly be. He didn't want the Chinese to come up with a working open source CUDA alternative which was just as good, and just as usable by the non-Chinese.
Nvidia's playbook was to make sure everybody was focused on competing against each other and not against Nvidia. This meant larger allocations to small players than would seem rational at first glance, investing into those players to make sure they survived and could compete against the hyperscalers and frontier labs, spending effort and human capital on optimizations which made open models run better on Nvidia hardware, making them more competitive with closed offerings, that sort of thing. This was a big part of Jensen's strategy.
Why not just sell to not-sanctioned entities, ensure compliance to the best of your abilities and otherwise keep your head down? Again, wasn't like they struggled to find buyers for their chips.
Considering Megaspeed, I now see this in a very different light. Him cheating is personal and I wish the affected members of any family of a cheater the best, but not relevant for us outsiders.
Being honey trapped very bad securities wise, but he'd be a victim (and evidence for why we shouldn't discount Mistral in the frontier lab race [1]). If sanctions avoidance went all the way to the top, that is hard to negate even for a board that is interested in keeping him.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI
[1] https://time.com/archive/7146565/hollandes-popularity-goes-u...