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Re:Nvidia Allegedly Engineered Scarcity by Funding AI Startu... by lizknope on Saturday November 14, 2026 @11:16AM (#50498196)
> Nvidia knows it is going to sell 100% of its inventory.

The WSJ article is basically saying the opposite. The hyperscalers are making their own chips and they are buying less from Nvidia.

This is my comment in another part of this thread

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50493251#50496483

> Then he went on to describe the situation the company was in. Major cloud providers were running away from Nvidia, making plans to use alternative chips and lessen their reliance on the firm. Even worse, Huang said, the vast supply of chip wafers and memory Nvidia had committed to buying were coming at him like an “avalanche.”

Jensen's son-in-law was making these vendor financed deals and Kress the CFO now interim CEO was against them.

Large customers like Nvidia and Apple want billions of chips. TSMC can't just ramp up and down instantly. It takes 3+ years and $30 billion to build a modern fab. So TSMC has contracts where you are commiting to buy the wafers for years in advance.

I've worked for multiple fabless chip companies that use TSMC to manufacture. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and the other big hyperscalers are making their own AI chips to move away from Nvidia. The startups like OpenAI are doing the same so the real demand for Nvidia chips is dropping. But Nvidia can't easily get out of the contracts with TSMC to manufacture and buy the chips. They would probably have multi billion penalties that would show up on their financial statements.

Some people think Nvidia is acting as a VC fund for AI startups but my view is that Jensen freaked out about the dropping demand for Nvidia chips. So he is funding these startups with circular finance deals to buy the Nvidia chips that he can't sell to the hyperscalers anymore.

Re:Nvidia Allegedly Engineered Scarcity by Funding AI Startu... by tccole on Saturday November 14, 2026 @11:18AM (#50498220)
Do you have the link to the WSJ article. I would love to read it.
Re:Nvidia Allegedly Engineered Scarcity by Funding AI Startu... by lizknope on Saturday November 14, 2026 @11:27AM (#50498291)
It's linked at various places in the thread but here it is

https://archive.is/20261113091227/https://www.wsj.com/tech/j...

Re:Nvidia Allegedly Engineered Scarcity by Funding AI Startu... by retwakm4 on Saturday November 14, 2026 @11:58AM (#50498550)
The Hyperscalars are often working with companies like Broadcom to design said chips. They don't usually have the amount of ASIC expertise in house that would be required. See, for instance, Googles TPUs.
Re:Nvidia Allegedly Engineered Scarcity by Funding AI Startu... by lizknope on Saturday November 14, 2026 @12:08PM (#50498637)
I've been in the chip design industry for 30 years now and know tons of people doing this. The hyperscalers all have their own chip design teams but they have multiple chips (server CPUs, AI accelerators, complex multi chip module packaging, and more) so they can't do all of them in house. As you said they partner with multiple companies to help develop them.
Re:Nvidia Allegedly Engineered Scarcity by Funding AI Startu... by retwakm4 on Saturday November 14, 2026 @12:23PM (#50498791)
Yep, I'm ex-Broadcom. I removed it cause we get a lot of bad press whenever we fire smaller clients, but I enjoyed my time there and thought they were very well run. I doubt I'll work at another hardware company that operated like them again, it was really kinda special. Or at least I doubt I'll ever reach the same total comp haha.
Re:Nvidia Allegedly Engineered Scarcity by Funding AI Startu... by wcfields on Saturday November 14, 2026 @12:03PM (#50498585)
So could the smuggling chips to China (and based upon a latest GamersNexus video chips are showing up in recovered Russian drones), be the thing that’s holding the whole thing up?

Is this Jensens “Delorean cocaine” ?