YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Nvidia is the central bank of AI

68 points tolugenius 1 hour ago 44 comments

tolugenius 1 hour ago | parent

Archive: http://archive.today/kt50V

epsteingpt 53 minutes ago | parent

This is a good headline and point.

Realistically, they're worse than a central bank, because they can't exactly expand supply monotonically like a normal central bank. Nor do they realistically control rates.

amelius 36 minutes ago | parent

And what is TSMC in this analogy?

tccole 33 minutes ago | parent

Idk… government bonds or something?

creativeSlumber 30 minutes ago | parent

do they lend money to their customers to buy their own chips?

aeonik 30 minutes ago | parent

The currency press operator and manufacturer.

bigyikes 29 minutes ago | parent

What’s upstream of the central bank? …Congress?

itsalwaysgood 28 minutes ago | parent

A platform: aka the foundation under the bank.

The material cement that allows chips to exist above it.

And the platform is made of time: ours.

overcast 19 minutes ago | parent

ASML is the foundation. Without them, none of this would exist.

petcat 13 minutes ago | parent

I think we can go even further and say that IBM, Zeiss, several Japanese companies, and even the US Department of Energy are the actual foundation since ASML is largely just an integrator of many different technologies they license from elsewhere.

treebeard901 28 minutes ago | parent

The Japanese economy and yen carry trade is a close second.Rising oul prices and reduced output due to the conflicts in the Middle East could filter through to increasing yields on Japanese debt. In turn, the yen interventions have to continue to keep it lower than 160, which seems to be the psychological barrier for the yen carry trade.

yieldcrv 25 minutes ago | parent

I view the market as celestial objects influencing each other through a lattice similar to spacetime

Everything influences each other with varying gravitational pull

At one point the mental model was more like a web, but spacetime with mass matches the model more closely

Avicebron 16 minutes ago | parent

Money is a lot like mass, it has it's own gravity.

thrownawaysz 25 minutes ago | parent

I wonder when they will give up on the gaming market because that could take down several publishers and developers. I really don't think it's an if question but a when because it almost feels like an afterthought at this point (they removed the standalone gaming revenue report from the financial reports this summer). Also I don't think AMD and Intel is capable "to step in" to replace them.

CuriouslyC 20 minutes ago | parent

AAA gaming is cooked, and AMD/Intel is plenty able to support indie to AA needs.

12ha6 15 minutes ago | parent

Kushner and MBS bought Electronic Arts for $55 billion, so at least there will be a bailout or instructions to Nvidia to continue gaming cards.

Synthetic7346 12 minutes ago | parent

How so? I have a 5070ti but from what I've read the 9070xt keeps up well enough. As long as you don't need the cuda or dlss AMD is a good option

c0balt 5 minutes ago | parent

That seems a bit overzealous, most consoles[0] run on AMD chips today.

Both PS 5 and Xbox are based on AMD APUs and both serve the AAA market quite well. GTA 6, Assassin's Creed and CoD are probably good enough indicators that the performance is enough, even if there is always room for more (as PC ports show). The PC market will also probably be fine even if stagnation in perfomance gains has been creeping in for a few years now.

[0]: except Nintendo which relies on NVIDIA although their APU there focuses more on efficiency than top performance.

traverseda 18 minutes ago | parent

Eh, AMD makes a lot of video game console SoCs. If you look at the steam hardware survey most people are running ancient computers.

raincole 18 minutes ago | parent

They're advertising DLSS5 just now though.

> I really don't think it's an if question but a when because it almost feels like an afterthought

I feel your reasoning is very weird. Are they losing money by selling consumer GPU? Just because the profit isn't that much compared to AI it doesn't mean that it's negative, and for-profit companies are not known for leaving money on the table. Apple doesn't reveal how much Apple TV+ makes for them either but I don't see it be gone anytime soon.

thrownawaysz 10 minutes ago | parent

Which is distinctly different both in purpose and technology than the previous versions. DLSS 5 is no longer about frame improvements. It’s about increasing graphical fidelity with active AI rendering.

DLSS 5 is trying to relight and retexture the scene using AI. DLSS 4 is just trying to take a lower quality image and upscale it using AI

raincole 5 minutes ago | parent

Thank for explaining what DLSS5 is! I don't think it has anything to do with "Nvidia is going to give up gaming market" narrative though.

redox99 16 minutes ago | parent

They may allocate different number of resources every year based on market conditions but they'll never give up on gaming, that would be extremely silly.

bigyabai 15 minutes ago | parent

> I really don't think it's an if question but a when

Nvidia still will ship gaming products. The upcoming RTX Spark laptop APUs are still gaming-capable - we also have Blackwell gaming GPUs and the Nvidia-powered Nintendo Switch 2.

People echoed this sentiment during the crypto mining crunch, and we still got gaming hardware designs after that blew over. One of CUDA's core value props is the consumer market, and Nvidia probably won't surrender it unless hardware becomes unreasonably scarce.

the8472 6 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

Waterluvian 10 minutes ago | parent

Maybe this is silly of me, but maybe gaming would enjoy an era of hardware upgrades being rather unviable so the focus turns to optimization and aesthetic.

delusional 7 minutes ago | parent

A retraction from the gaming market wouldn't necessarily mean they'd still even produce the current crop of products. I could (and I would argue would) involve a complete shuttering of the GeForce brand, halting current production. On the assumption that Intel and AMD would follow, that wouldn't be an end of upgrades, but an end to the market.

u1hcw9nx 24 minutes ago | parent

If Nvidia is a bank, it's an Islamic Bank. They don't take interest (usury), they share profits and risk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_banking_and_finance

Imagine a scenario where the AI bubble bursts and AI companies and neoclouds go bankrupt en masse, and then a huge rebound occurs when AI has a delayed takeoff. Nvidia ends up with a massive amount of compute on its hands from its backstop deals, and it also owns assets from failed companies when profits start to grow. Hugging face takes the place of OpenAI and Anthropic when their assets are divided between survivors like Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta.

caaqil 13 minutes ago | parent

Of all the BS tech dudebro takes I read on a daily basis, I never guessed I would see this one on HN. It's so absurd it's not even wrong.

lumost 7 minutes ago | parent

While I dislike this take, when the dust settles we will have compute clusters orders of magnitude larger than anything that existed in 2023.

If demand vanishes for the 3 million cards Amazon just bought, then something will be done with them. The AI market may end up in a bizarre jepson's paradox of rotation between inference use cases and model training.

pwillia7 21 minutes ago | parent

Should there be a LIBOR for 1GB VRAM set each morning?

quickthrowman 8 minutes ago | parent

CME is launching futures contracts for GPU compute: https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/energy/power/compute-future...

anthonybourdain 20 minutes ago | parent

Okay, but at some point these investments need to start turning profits; the financing NVDA has arranged is temporary, and private credit needs returns at some point. The overinvestment in AI will lead to a downturn in the capital cycle.

Mistletoe 15 minutes ago | parent

How many top signals like this article do you need to see before you exit the market?

Let’s look to the past:

https://www.history.com/articles/1929-stock-market-crash-war...

tonyhart7 6 minutes ago | parent

just cashout at the peak, hedge fund manager probably

JohnnyMarcone 6 minutes ago | parent

Where did you exit to?

tccole 5 minutes ago | parent

As the saying goes. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

ama4efaria 7 minutes ago | parent

hardware? yes Nvidia is software? Google is. AI = Data Data = Google