YHK - yet another hacker news clone

It can be normal, legal and still morally bankrupt. Fuck these parasites

Forcing your customers to buy additional hardware they don't need to inflate the prices of your own product is a crime in the united states of america.

It get worse when we find out they did it to increase nvidia production for the purpose of being able to redirect more output to china.

The whole entire AI bubble was actually jensen's smuggling operation to china. These large data centers have no purpose and cost more money in power grid upgrades than any company will ever make operating them.

The only winners look to be jensen's bank account, the bank accounts of the CEOs that signed the deals to buy unneeded hardware, and the chinese buisnesses that were able to buy more nvidia graphics cards.

It is not a crime for these CEOs to drive their companies into the ground to make themselves richer. Most CEOs do this today. It is a crime if we find out all of this was really a chinese smuggling operation and that would make it the largest crime per monetary value in US history.

Everyone who made money on this smuggling ring has criminal liability. Just like with madoff, the people who withdrew gains had to pay it back because the gains weren't real. Not paying it back would make you an accomplice.

"Nvidia was in talks to provide billions of dollars of guarantees to companies that couldn’t afford its chips. That included deals led by Huang’s son-in-law, Nico Caprez, who had been offering upstart cloud providers and data-center developers financing in the hopes of turning them into long-term customers."

...

"Amid the rollout of the program, Kress raised questions including how to decide which deals to pursue, how to value the guarantees, and how to calculate the return on investment, a person familiar with the matter said. Behind the scenes, she tried to rein in Huang’s son-in-law, who had been promoted to a vice president in January, people who worked with her said."

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-- https://archive.is/gx14x

It sounds like there may have been a little bit of Nepotism. This article also suggests that Huang himself was uncomfortable with the deals Nvidia and the data centres it had invested in were making, although he appeared to shift blame onto those running the data-centres.

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"In Berlin during a conference, Huang, accompanied by his top sales executives, broadcast a new message to a half-dozen CEOs of companies that are major buyers of Nvidia chips who were seated around a circular table. He opened with a story that sounded like a fable, according to people who attended.

Huang had once found a soup vendor in Japan, he said, with a long line of customers. He joined the line, and after a long wait, enjoyed one of the best bowls of soup he’d ever had. When he asked for another serving, the soup-seller told him no—he had too many customers waiting and not enough soup for all of them.

“He’s a better businessperson than all of you,” Huang told the cloud computing CEOs. The soup-man doesn’t sell out all his inventory to one or two customers, but instead keeps prices high and his customer base diverse, the CEO said.

“You are not establishing the value of my products,” he said."

Remember when Microsoft got in years of antitrust lawsuits over bundling a browser with their OS? Bring back that level of legal scrutiny to antitrust, and sever the absurdly close ties the US government has with the top 100 companies in the country.

Ram makers are more understandable since they went through this already in the past. The Koreans learned it the hard way.

The free market where every innovation is locked up for 20 years behind patent walls? That free market?

I believe we should start working towards a "fair" market. Free, is almost impossible to attain IMO.

That's what these allegations of circular financing are about? Extending credit? Lmao

Especially with the buyout of SchedMD, who support Slurm for these large HPC clusters doing the AI training.

Into what exactly? They have a single product that makes them money.

No, competition needs to get their heads together.

I don't think they need to be broken up. Nvidia needs to be investigated.

There are stories of huge amounts of sold chips sitting in warehouses unused. This could be channel stuffing which is illegal

There are stories of Nvidia threatening that customers have to buy these chips now or they will be cut off and not able to buy the next gen. That may be illegal

Perhaps so. There's certainly a problem with producers using financialization to distort the market for their products. But I think financialization itself is the larger problem. Financial engineering of various kinds seems to make up more of our economy than ever, despite the lessons of the 2008 crisis, and I conjecture that the real economic benefits come anywhere near the nominal gains; that is to say, I we've badly unestimated the inflationary impact of ubiquitous financialization.

I say force them to FOSS their microcodes, firmwares, and drivers. Same thing for Intel/AMD. Same for all UEFI code. ARM doesn't get to escape either. No more 'appliance' Universal Machines; if you sell a Universal Machine as or in your product then you must allow the owner or primary leasee full access to it and its capabilities. This includes segmentation switches, which must not be permanent fuses. If a chip is segmented due to failure of manufacture, then the owner/leasee unsegmenting it should be at owner/leasee's risk.

Not a monopoly. 3dfx is going to drop the voodoo 6 soon

But they don't have a monopoly. Their marketshare is sinking, down to perhaps 45% of estimated TSMC CoWoS supply next year (down from close to 70% last year).

> especially those who counted on Nvidia stock to finance their retirement

well it's no secret that this sort of stock was not that good, I don't think that many people counted on nvidia for their retirement

I’m not being sarcastic, but isn’t that the exact mandate of a CEO?

I honestly find his podcast a little grating and his personality needlessly abrasive/smug at times, but at the end of the day I still read and listen here and there because the dude does nail it often enough to warrant some of his attitude.

The claim is coming from the Wall Street Journal

Zitron already has a video about it but he is just reaffirming what the article already said.