One strategic reason is to remove oxygen from competitors. Otherwise someone will scoop up the gaming market and put the proceeds into developing technology to compete with NVIDIA in the more lucrative AI space.
I wonder who is going to fill the gaming market if AI market focused companies would simply outbid them during manufacturing? All available and not yet available manufacture is pivoting to AI market
“I wouldn’t pick up $20 if there was $100 on the ground!”
Most people would pick up both.
These economic proclamations don’t seem to make sense, when applied to different contexts — which suggests what you’re saying might be folk wisdom rather than sound theory (and greatly over simplifying the problem).
You’re also discounting ecosystem effects — gaming GPUs driving demand for datacenter and workstation GPUs as hobbyist experimentation turns into industrial usage. We don’t know what would happen if nVidia stopped suppressing the GPU market, because it’s never been tried — nVidia has always viciously undercut their own grassroots.
> “I wouldn’t pick up $20 if there was $100 on the ground!” Most people would pick up both.
No, it’s more like there’s a massive pile of both $20s and $100s on the ground. You wouldn’t waste time running between the two, you’d focus on the $100s
if you're within reach of both, then it's not a choice, and there's no opportunity cost in picking just one - you'd be taking both.
If not within reach of both but just one, and you picking one up means someone else might pick up the other, then which would you choose? The other is then by definition, the opportunity cost.
cash cannot buy more fabs. ASML machines are the constraint, plus TSMC's capacity is a constraint.
Not to mention that nvidia's cash pile isn't magic - they should not overpay for capacity; they're better off returning cash to investors in that case.
You’re standing on a traffic island in the middle of a busy road. The lights change allowing you to cross. On one side there is a $20 note, on the other there is a $100 note. Which side do you go to first?
I wouldn't pick up either even with empty hands. No idea where they've been. Maybe a fiver, a twenty sure. At that point I'd put down my bags and grab both.
While the most well known, there are other points of presence doing the same thing. Easy and trivial to duplicate traffic at line speed. It doesn't affect the traffic flow itself.
A decent number of people reading this probably do have secret clearance. But that's not really the relevant point.
Simply having secret clearance doesn't mean you can just go digging around arbitrary secret classified info that you have no business reading. And it certainly doesn't mean that discussion can be had on hackernews.
That is simplifying it to the point of a lab experiment. It’s a bit more complicated but yes, you can split light and route that light anywhere you want.
What you can't do is ship 80% of the traffic across the world to the US without either the ISPs agreeing, and thus a conspiracy of thousands of people in thousands of ISPs, or doing it outside the data centres, meaning millions of taps in various ducts around the globe, which would be found on a daily basis.
Interesting, I wasn't aware of that connection either. I was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer, but was identified as 'genetic' and not caused by diet or lifestyle. I used to be a heavy runner too, done a few marathons, and plenty more 10k, 8ks etc. Wonder if that could be a correlation... Treatments have it contained/in maintenance so at least I have that going for me.
Ah, that definitely wasn't offered to me as an option. Glad to see the progress however. It would be nice if there was an alternative test so that I could tell my kids it's not genetic.
IMO, it goes against 'self-hosted' too. Self-hosting for your own data, control of it, and handling of it. Self-hosting to learn new things and scratch your own itch for a niche product. AI vibe coding doesn't have any of that. Literally an _idea_ that someone else implements and you the 'coder' don't really have any control or understanding of.
Why would I want to take ownership of that for my own security?
Listing an active US security clearance on your LinkedIn or resume, is a sure fire way to get malicious actors trying to "hire" you; and makes you way more of a target. Especially combined with your technologies, company and time frame worked... It's just realy bad idea.
