Nvidia seems to be operating more like a sovereign wealth fund than a traditional business. They have a very-in-demand product, that is not likely to last forever, and is getting their fingers in as many pies as possible with the money and influence while they have it.
> To me, that seems to be a requirement for the computing industry for a long time.
Sure, but they have a market cap of 5 trillion. It's about 10x that of AMD, which also sells similar silicon (and isn't in any distress). It's more than Apple, Google, and Microsoft - and these companies historically found ways to make more money than the vendors they buy chips from.
The problem isn't that Nvidia doesn't have good fundamentals or good products, it's that the market is expecting miracles.
In the case of Nvidia, the funny thing is that their high valuations started not with AI, but with cryptocurrencies. Just never really came down - they coasted from a silly hype cycle to a more substantive one. Ten years ago, NVDA wasn't an interesting stock at all.
Perhaps not forever but GPUs for AI is likely to be a very solid and profitable business for a long time. CPUs made plenty of money for their makers in that era.
AI, while undeniably powerful and transformative, is in the midst of the biggest, most insane tech bubble we have ever seen. And nearly all of that money is ending up, directly or indirectly, in GPU data centers. And NVIDIA is the largest cost (profit maker) there.
When that investment firehouse gets turned off, the AI providers will stop building new data centers. Likely for some years. That revenue stream for NVIDIA will go to zero so fast…
Demand for chips has only increased since their invention and never gone down, much less "to zero." Chips are a critical part of the tech business for the foreseeable future, regardless of what happens with AI or any other use case for them. They're raw material for computing, and computing use only goes up.
NVIDIA growth in data center sales the last 4 years: 2022: from $6.7 billion +58.5% to $10.61 billion; 2023: +41.4% to $15.01 billion; 2024: +216.7% to $47.53 billion; 2025: +142.4% to $115.19 billion
NVIDIA isn’t a startup. It isn’t disrupting a market. It is the ESTABLISHMENT. Low double-digit growth numbers for market leader in established industries would be, by itself tremendously remarkable. Apple was 6% last year, for example. That’s doing great.
NVIDIA grew 142% this year and 217% the year before. That’s… that’s f%#£ing unbelievable is what that is.
The entire consumer market for NVIDIA is less than 10% of their data center market. NVIDIA is a ln AI company with a side hustle in computer graphics. Oh and a nontrivial amount of that is researchers and small companies buying consumer chips for non-LLM AI training and inference, so real numbers are even smaller.
“Zero”, while not mathematically accurate, is indistinguishable here. Elimination of most of the data center sales would immediately move market valuations by trillions of dollars.
Man, I feel old. I remember feeling this way during dot-com bubble. The few months of unemployment grounded me. Anyway, better positioned this time. History is a good teacher.
Demand for networking equipment has only increased since their invention and never gone down, much less "to zero".
I'm sure that same phrase was echoed at Nortel and more offices in the 90s.
It's all hot stuff until you have a few billion dollars worth of inventory manufactured that you can barely give away for a million dollars one day. Sure it's not zero, but you're still pretty fucked in the end.
NVIDIA doesn’t separate their networking revenue, but at time of acquisition mellanox had less than a billion dollars on sales. Less a half a percent of NVIDIA’s current data center sales. That has undoubtedly grown, but I would be surprised if the networking share of their data center business was more than a rounding error. Keep in mind they sell GPUs for $50k, 2-8GPUs per box, and even a state of the art Infiniband card to put in that machine is only a few thousand bucks.
The total aggregate loss of value from top to bottom of the dotcom crash was about $5 trillion. That’s the current market cap of NVIDIA alone, to say nothing of other AI companies. So yeah, it has.
AI is a bubble and will pop soon, theres no way even 80% of the spending has yielded the returns they were looking for. Nvidia cards will lower in demand though probably the bubble will be a net gain for nvidia over the preceding 4 or 5 years, though it will take them a while to regain their peak market cap
The classical answer would be RCA, who famously bought Carpetland, Banquet Foods, and Hertz car rental, and was bequeathed the moniker "Rugs, Chickens, and Automobiles" by the investment community.
Buying a stake in Nokia is admittedly different than taking it over and managing it, but the danger there is very clear. Distracted management that strays away from core competence can easily kill the golden goose driving revenue.
The contrarian view is that Berkshire Hathaway is able to hold an array of successful manufacturing and service businesses (Kirby vacuum cleaners, Dairy Queen, Clayton Homes, and the prominent Sees Candy) without losing management control of GEICO and their other insurance holdings.
Hopefully, Nvidia sees the example of RCA and Gulf Western, and will not lose focus on their core competence.
RCA famously birthed the semiconductor industry in Taiwan. I think that focused trade regulation would prevent a repeat of that event in modern times.
Edit: It appears that RCA bought Coronet Carpets, not Carpetland.
Nokia today is the combination of the network businesses of Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel and Lucent.
They have substantial operations in North America. T-Mobile uses primarily their hardware. Nokia still operates Bell Labs which came originally from AT&T via Lucent.
As the other global options for network hardware are Ericsson, Samsung and Huawei, Nokia is the closest to a “Made in USA” solution. Its HQ is in Finland but at least it’s a NATO country now.
So they’re more important to US infrastructure than might appear at first glance.
What do you imply with "atleast its a nato country"? Its not like finland have ever been anti-west, if this was your point. Nato alone does not imply pro-west (the US/trump leadership being the prime example)
Unless they bought back Siemens into NSN, I think not.
I was part of the Nokia => NSN transition, and saw that S change back from Siemens into Solutions, with the money they got back from selling Nokia Mobile to Microsoft.
Ericsson is swedish
Samsung is south korean
I can agree that Huawei is chinese so that's a bad choice
But why is Ericsson(swedish), Samsung(south korean) not considered made in US in the sense that atleast south korea has strong relations with america iirc and also I just recently checked and it seems that sweden has also become a part of nato. So some of these can be just as good.
Although I still agree that Nokia might be important in general but I just wanted to point/question it out I suppose.
UPDATE: the production facilities seem to be closed; only office buildings remain somewhere.
Per Wikipedia [1], Lucent's factories and offices are^W were situated in places like Murray Hill and Mount Olive, NJ, North Andover, MA, Reading, PA, and a bunch of other places in the US.
I think it makes^W made Nokia, which owns Lucent properties, "more US" than, say Ericsson and Samsung, until these facilities were closed.
A large number of telecom companies have Alcatel routers like the 7750 . My personal thought was that the control plane OS was likely based on Plan9, though I never had access to any source code to verify that.
Cisco, Juniper, and Arista make carrier hardware like cell phone radios and controllers and traditional telephone network switches?
While there's probably a little overlap in all of their product lines with Nokia (I mean Nokia makes simple ethernet switches so that carriers can buy all their gear from one vendor), most of those companies don't really compete in the same markets as Nokia
Cisco isn't selling into T-Mobile and AT&T's customer networks. Nokia isn't selling into JPMorgan's or Walmart's IP networks
That kind of stuff is the closest that they would come to compete with the others cited. They're all trying to get into datacenter gear, but Cisco specifically has gotten out of various levels of service provider network gear (they sold off all their cable network stuff, for example) which is where Nokia, Ericsson, etc all make their bread and butter
>I think the US Gov probably "incentizied" Nvidias stake in Intel, and I wonder if they did here as well.
They definitely did, Intel existing is probably an issue of national security at this point, if Intel fell then there'd be the risk of some other nation's company being part of the duopoly.
> They definitely did, Intel existing is probably an issue of national security at this point, if Intel fell then there'd be the risk of some other nation's company being part of the duopoly.
Mind elaborating? Who are the players in the duopoly?
I'm not sure why Arm is in parenthesis twice, when it's a full-blown, non-American CPU designer on whose coat-tails Apple and Qualcomm have been riding.
Risc-V moved HQs to be a non-American CPU designer, but perhaps you don't find them credible (yet).
Or they could be referring to the Wintel monopoly (Windows+Intel), or the x86 duopoly (Intel+AMD), or the FPGA duopoly (Altera=>Intel + Xilinx=>AMD)...
Global Foundries sent their EUV machine back (and paid a fat restocking fee to do it), they've stopped trying to compete at the leading edge of logic processes.
SMIC has a DUV multi-patterning 7 nm node which is already economically uncompetitive with EUV 7 nm nodes (except for PRC subsidies) and the economics of DUV only get worse further down, but at least they're trying and will certainly be the first client to use the Chinese EUV machines, whenever those come online.
Not a direct competitor, they are at a No3 slot behind Ericsson with a small global footprintmainly concentrated in NorthAmerica and some EU markets.
However most of the 5G/5G+ patents are Huawei owned and FRAND so in any case the entiti in the drivers seat is H , thas why even the whole OpenRAN project didnt get far.
Most likely like you surmiseits a geo-political hedge play.
Yep the big three plus Huawei with a bit of an edge on them with te standard essential patent , that they collaborate in a pool with.Although in the matter of mobile modems/radios Qualcomm has an edge over all the others - not so much in the backend/longhaul telco space.
Additionally if i recall most of the 6G stuff is being pushed by Huawei since most of it rests on the current 5G/5G+ work.
> I think the US Gov probably "incentizied" Nvidias stake in Intel, and I wonder if they did here as well.
If you wanted something in the x86 space it was either Intel or AMD. AMD is a direct competitor. If I was Nvidia I'd have done something about Intel. At least stop them from crashing further.
The stock of NVIDIA can buy the 230 smallest S&P 500 companies. Which are still quite big companies. I recently learned this fact and I think it is pretty wild.
Do you mean their market cap? Sure but that doesn’t equal their profits or cash reserves which are considerably less so NVIDIA couldn’t buy the 230 companies even if I wanted to
That’s a good point, which immediately makes me curious — how many of the smallest sp500 companies could nvidia outright purchase (or obtain a majority stake in)? It’s just a curiosity, not trying to demand an answer. I might look at it tomorrow if I have time
Its' getting more crazy by the day. Today NVidia added >300B USD in market cap. That's enough more than the valuation of Intel for example. Or more than Toyota. That 1B USD investement was money well spent !
In year 2000, Nokia had a market cap of around $100 billion and Nvidia had a market cap of around $2 to 4 billion.
Nvidia just made graphics cards, at a time when games were still being written for MS-DOS. Nobody was to imagine the real money to be made from repurposing these graphics cards for crypto and now this AI 'application'.
I was reading an article earlier today that said passive investing is more than 50% of the market--and since most ETFs allocate by market cap, it causes a reinforcing feedback loop for market cap leaders.
Passive investing is not an issue, but the default bias towards large cap equities like SP500, Nasdaq100. Passive investing through total market ETFs (like VTI) maintains the status quo.
For example, if they are only two companies, say with 1T and 4T market cap. If one invests 5M into a total market ETF, 1M is allocated to company A and 4M to company B. But since company B is 4x bigger than company A, the upward price pressure is the same for both companies.
The problem is that companies with large market cap will get more of any subsequent investment because many fund's allocate new money by current market cap.
If you ever played Risk, or most other games, once the snowball starts, it's hard to stop it.
Of course, since the market has never been like this before, it's a speculation...
Interesting move. Nvidia’s already owning the AI hardware space, and now teaming with Nokia shows telecoms want a piece of it too. Feels like the next battle is about who controls the data pipes, not just the chips.
I was thinking more that they already own Mellanox, so it makes sense to buy into a networking company. Nokia still makes telecom gear, but they also make switches and routers.
This isn't the gotcha everyone in the media thinks it is.
Nvidia is using its revenues to quickly invest in bets that are simultaneously customers.
If anything, it's a triple win.
- taking advantage of cash it needs to deploy
- making new investments in areas NVidia wants to shape
- making new customers that continue to buy Nvidia GPUs, especially if they're successful
Some of these ventures may fail, but it's better than distributing dividends or issuing stock buybacks if you believe this technology will be useful in the future.
Companies doing this purely off of equity, stock valuation, and product/services agreements are even smarter as they're using pure hype to fund strategy.
Cooking your books and calling it a "triple win" is certainly interesting. Nokia just diluted their shares in hopes that AI hype keeps the price pumped up. They do keep the $1B so I guess we'll see what they do with it (other than buying NVDA GPUs, of course)
The radio access network (RAN) is all the RF part of a mobile network: towers, base stations, the signals between our phones and the towers, phone-to-satellite comms (non-terrestrial network or NTN).
AI-RAN uses AI/ML for adaptive behaviors and optimizations in all these links.
For example, fine-grained RF and modulation details, called the channel state information (CSI), is constantly being exchanged between a phone and a base station. The volume of information creates transmission latencies. Using autoencoder models, this information can be semantically compressed to reduce its volume and decoded with high fidelity on the other side.
That's just one example. In the upcoming 6G, RAN will be "AI-native", using AI/ML everywhere. The standards may require AI accelerator chips in most base stations, NTN satellites, phones, and other elements.
It's the name given to an initiative by telco vendors like Nokia and Ericson to explore using NVIDIA GPUs to supply the core compute needs of next generation Radio Access Networks (RAN).
That growing narrative regarding all these AI-centric companies "funding each other" is beginning to look a lot like Attrition.org's (former) sexchart..
Given 5g patent mostly h, usa has missed the boat. Somehow has to find its way back or be dominated. Not necessarily can build an empire or even a duopoly… but at least stay in the game like Intel. Understandable from usa point of view.
Quietly supplying telecom equipment all this time, it really isn't the Nokia most know. Crazy that Nokia is still even a thing. Who noticed that logo had even changed (two years ago in 2023).
The bubble burst is going to be devastating for these smaller companies caught up in the frenzy. I'm staying invested in companies like Alphabet that are taking part in the race but offer more than just AI hopium.
As someone that was an employee at the time, I am also fed up with the anti-Microsoft narrative.
Also there are some errors there, Windows Phone only became an alternative after the burning platform memo, that wasn't at all well received neither internally, nor by the 3rd party devs that had just started to migrate their Symbian tooling yet again, this time to Qt + PIPS + Carbide.
The biggest blame with the board, as revealed on the Finish press, was the bonus clause on Elop contract to sell Nokia Mobile business.
Nokia never executed on a touch screen OS. If i remember their final attempt with a Linux based OS was considered "good", but it was too little, too late. It was already over when they were scooped up by Microsoft, who were desperate themselves.
Pretty sure Nokia was glad to offload the handset business so they could feed money into markets they were still competitive in.
All the Symbian devices used resistive touch screens, though, didn't they? E.g. the Sony Ericsson Vivaz. So the user experience was not quite the same as with capacitive touch.
It wasn't iPhone that doomed Nokia, it was Android. All of the sudden all Nokia's competitors could ship fairly good touch screen phones, while previously Nokia had a virtual monopoly on advanced mobile operating systems (barring BlackBerry in the US).
Granted, it was going to happen anyway, probably through Microsoft if Google hadn't commoditized that market first.
It's not quite the same, BlackBerry was mostly a 'phone' company and not a 'full telecom' company, in terms of hardware the produced. Nokia has other products that are more b2b than b2c.
Nokia has existed for over a hundred years. The success of its phones made it a major name and a ton of money in the early 2000s. Its other lines of business have continued to operate quietly. But it's no longer the force it was.
There was just no way Nokia could match Apple on the OS who spent years prior to the idea of a smartphone making it a good match for the hardware of the time. And MSFT deservedly got punished for not investing in creating a better OS and Apple deservedly rewarded for doing so.
They may never have had the chance to beat Apple but they could certainly have bet on Android instead of Windows Phone and today they probably would have been in a different place like Samsung.
Nvidia seems to be operating more like a sovereign wealth fund than a traditional business. They have a very-in-demand product, that is not likely to last forever, and is getting their fingers in as many pies as possible with the money and influence while they have it.
As it seems now, they are into producing silicon that does massive parallel calculations, and variants on it thereof.
To me, that seems to be a requirement for the computing industry for a long time.
And, they seemed to have amassed enough capital to comfortably pivot to the next great thing that requires similar calculations.
I think this is their super power.
The next logical step would be to get into CPUs, to become a fully integrated computing solutions provider.
> To me, that seems to be a requirement for the computing industry for a long time.
Sure, but they have a market cap of 5 trillion. It's about 10x that of AMD, which also sells similar silicon (and isn't in any distress). It's more than Apple, Google, and Microsoft - and these companies historically found ways to make more money than the vendors they buy chips from.
The problem isn't that Nvidia doesn't have good fundamentals or good products, it's that the market is expecting miracles.
In the case of Nvidia, the funny thing is that their high valuations started not with AI, but with cryptocurrencies. Just never really came down - they coasted from a silly hype cycle to a more substantive one. Ten years ago, NVDA wasn't an interesting stock at all.
Nvidia is already doing that under MGX. They also offer their Grace CPUs on that platform.
Perhaps not forever but GPUs for AI is likely to be a very solid and profitable business for a long time. CPUs made plenty of money for their makers in that era.
AI, while undeniably powerful and transformative, is in the midst of the biggest, most insane tech bubble we have ever seen. And nearly all of that money is ending up, directly or indirectly, in GPU data centers. And NVIDIA is the largest cost (profit maker) there.
When that investment firehouse gets turned off, the AI providers will stop building new data centers. Likely for some years. That revenue stream for NVIDIA will go to zero so fast…
The unknown, as with any bubble, is timing.
Demand for chips has only increased since their invention and never gone down, much less "to zero." Chips are a critical part of the tech business for the foreseeable future, regardless of what happens with AI or any other use case for them. They're raw material for computing, and computing use only goes up.
NVIDIA growth in data center sales the last 4 years: 2022: from $6.7 billion +58.5% to $10.61 billion; 2023: +41.4% to $15.01 billion; 2024: +216.7% to $47.53 billion; 2025: +142.4% to $115.19 billion
NVIDIA isn’t a startup. It isn’t disrupting a market. It is the ESTABLISHMENT. Low double-digit growth numbers for market leader in established industries would be, by itself tremendously remarkable. Apple was 6% last year, for example. That’s doing great.
NVIDIA grew 142% this year and 217% the year before. That’s… that’s f%#£ing unbelievable is what that is.
The entire consumer market for NVIDIA is less than 10% of their data center market. NVIDIA is a ln AI company with a side hustle in computer graphics. Oh and a nontrivial amount of that is researchers and small companies buying consumer chips for non-LLM AI training and inference, so real numbers are even smaller.
“Zero”, while not mathematically accurate, is indistinguishable here. Elimination of most of the data center sales would immediately move market valuations by trillions of dollars.
Man, I feel old. I remember feeling this way during dot-com bubble. The few months of unemployment grounded me. Anyway, better positioned this time. History is a good teacher.
Demand for networking equipment has only increased since their invention and never gone down, much less "to zero".
I'm sure that same phrase was echoed at Nortel and more offices in the 90s.
It's all hot stuff until you have a few billion dollars worth of inventory manufactured that you can barely give away for a million dollars one day. Sure it's not zero, but you're still pretty fucked in the end.
NVIDIA doesn’t separate their networking revenue, but at time of acquisition mellanox had less than a billion dollars on sales. Less a half a percent of NVIDIA’s current data center sales. That has undoubtedly grown, but I would be surprised if the networking share of their data center business was more than a rounding error. Keep in mind they sell GPUs for $50k, 2-8GPUs per box, and even a state of the art Infiniband card to put in that machine is only a few thousand bucks.
You are missing his point.
> most insane tech bubble we have ever seen.
the current "bubble" hasn't surpassed the dot-com boom yet.
The total aggregate loss of value from top to bottom of the dotcom crash was about $5 trillion. That’s the current market cap of NVIDIA alone, to say nothing of other AI companies. So yeah, it has.
AI is a bubble and will pop soon, theres no way even 80% of the spending has yielded the returns they were looking for. Nvidia cards will lower in demand though probably the bubble will be a net gain for nvidia over the preceding 4 or 5 years, though it will take them a while to regain their peak market cap
Which is not not smart.
edit: highlight: "not not". I think it's very smart.
Why is it not smart?
The classical answer would be RCA, who famously bought Carpetland, Banquet Foods, and Hertz car rental, and was bequeathed the moniker "Rugs, Chickens, and Automobiles" by the investment community.
Buying a stake in Nokia is admittedly different than taking it over and managing it, but the danger there is very clear. Distracted management that strays away from core competence can easily kill the golden goose driving revenue.
The contrarian view is that Berkshire Hathaway is able to hold an array of successful manufacturing and service businesses (Kirby vacuum cleaners, Dairy Queen, Clayton Homes, and the prominent Sees Candy) without losing management control of GEICO and their other insurance holdings.
Hopefully, Nvidia sees the example of RCA and Gulf Western, and will not lose focus on their core competence.
RCA famously birthed the semiconductor industry in Taiwan. I think that focused trade regulation would prevent a repeat of that event in modern times.
Edit: It appears that RCA bought Coronet Carpets, not Carpetland.
There were two nots
you calling nvidia dumb not smart
Nokia today is the combination of the network businesses of Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel and Lucent.
They have substantial operations in North America. T-Mobile uses primarily their hardware. Nokia still operates Bell Labs which came originally from AT&T via Lucent.
As the other global options for network hardware are Ericsson, Samsung and Huawei, Nokia is the closest to a “Made in USA” solution. Its HQ is in Finland but at least it’s a NATO country now.
So they’re more important to US infrastructure than might appear at first glance.
What do you imply with "atleast its a nato country"? Its not like finland have ever been anti-west, if this was your point. Nato alone does not imply pro-west (the US/trump leadership being the prime example)
Unless they bought back Siemens into NSN, I think not.
I was part of the Nokia => NSN transition, and saw that S change back from Siemens into Solutions, with the money they got back from selling Nokia Mobile to Microsoft.
Ericsson is swedish Samsung is south korean I can agree that Huawei is chinese so that's a bad choice
But why is Ericsson(swedish), Samsung(south korean) not considered made in US in the sense that atleast south korea has strong relations with america iirc and also I just recently checked and it seems that sweden has also become a part of nato. So some of these can be just as good.
Although I still agree that Nokia might be important in general but I just wanted to point/question it out I suppose.
UPDATE: the production facilities seem to be closed; only office buildings remain somewhere.
Per Wikipedia [1], Lucent's factories and offices are^W were situated in places like Murray Hill and Mount Olive, NJ, North Andover, MA, Reading, PA, and a bunch of other places in the US.
I think it makes^W made Nokia, which owns Lucent properties, "more US" than, say Ericsson and Samsung, until these facilities were closed.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucent_Technologies#Divisions
A large number of telecom companies have Alcatel routers like the 7750 . My personal thought was that the control plane OS was likely based on Plan9, though I never had access to any source code to verify that.
Why are you forgetting about Cisco, Juniper (now HPE), and Arista - all of which are US companies?
Also, why is Nokia closer to the US than Ericsson?
Cisco, Juniper, and Arista make carrier hardware like cell phone radios and controllers and traditional telephone network switches?
While there's probably a little overlap in all of their product lines with Nokia (I mean Nokia makes simple ethernet switches so that carriers can buy all their gear from one vendor), most of those companies don't really compete in the same markets as Nokia
Cisco isn't selling into T-Mobile and AT&T's customer networks. Nokia isn't selling into JPMorgan's or Walmart's IP networks
> As the other global options for network hardware
Hence my comment :)
Nokia does in fact compete with Cisco and the others, but less so than in the past.
Nokia also makes complex backbone carrier-grade network switches based on the Intellectual Property portfolio they acquired from Nortel.
That kind of stuff is the closest that they would come to compete with the others cited. They're all trying to get into datacenter gear, but Cisco specifically has gotten out of various levels of service provider network gear (they sold off all their cable network stuff, for example) which is where Nokia, Ericsson, etc all make their bread and butter
Because context is important and we're discussing Nokia and/or Nvidia in this particular thread.
Re-read the comment I replied to. I wasn’t the one who brought up how Nokia is the closest company to the US for network hardware.
>Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel and Lucent
That's an amazing trove of IP!
I think the US Gov probably "incentizied" Nvidias stake in Intel, and I wonder if they did here as well.
It's like "if your going to sell chips to China, you have to spend some of the money funding non-Chinese tech".
Nokia's capabilities to deliver 5G networks is a direct competitor to Huawei, right?
Is Nvidia functionally an strategic hedge fund of the US Government? Would this fall under Jeffrey Sach's realm?
>I think the US Gov probably "incentizied" Nvidias stake in Intel, and I wonder if they did here as well.
They definitely did, Intel existing is probably an issue of national security at this point, if Intel fell then there'd be the risk of some other nation's company being part of the duopoly.
> They definitely did, Intel existing is probably an issue of national security at this point, if Intel fell then there'd be the risk of some other nation's company being part of the duopoly.
Mind elaborating? Who are the players in the duopoly?
We currently have an all American oligopoly on the CPU market - Intel, AMD, Apple(ARM) and Qualcomm(ARM).
There's hardly any non-American CPU designers out there
I'm not sure why Arm is in parenthesis twice, when it's a full-blown, non-American CPU designer on whose coat-tails Apple and Qualcomm have been riding.
Risc-V moved HQs to be a non-American CPU designer, but perhaps you don't find them credible (yet).
Presumably referring to the logic foundry business where TSMC is the monopoly power and Intel, Samsung and SMIC are looking to turn it into a duopoly.
Or they could be referring to the Wintel monopoly (Windows+Intel), or the x86 duopoly (Intel+AMD), or the FPGA duopoly (Altera=>Intel + Xilinx=>AMD)...
Let's not forget GloFo although they are more interested in bulk at this point.mm
Global Foundries sent their EUV machine back (and paid a fat restocking fee to do it), they've stopped trying to compete at the leading edge of logic processes.
SMIC has a DUV multi-patterning 7 nm node which is already economically uncompetitive with EUV 7 nm nodes (except for PRC subsidies) and the economics of DUV only get worse further down, but at least they're trying and will certainly be the first client to use the Chinese EUV machines, whenever those come online.
Not a direct competitor, they are at a No3 slot behind Ericsson with a small global footprintmainly concentrated in NorthAmerica and some EU markets. However most of the 5G/5G+ patents are Huawei owned and FRAND so in any case the entiti in the drivers seat is H , thas why even the whole OpenRAN project didnt get far. Most likely like you surmiseits a geo-political hedge play.
Correct if I am wrong, but it is also noted that most essential 5G related patents are held by trio of Qualcomm, Ericsson and Nokia.
Yep the big three plus Huawei with a bit of an edge on them with te standard essential patent , that they collaborate in a pool with.Although in the matter of mobile modems/radios Qualcomm has an edge over all the others - not so much in the backend/longhaul telco space. Additionally if i recall most of the 6G stuff is being pushed by Huawei since most of it rests on the current 5G/5G+ work.
I get that they are now involved and contribute to 5g. But its pretty shameful how huawei had acquired the ability to do so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerns_over_Chinese_involvem...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-01/did-china...
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/13/us-charges-huawei-w...
Yes, worked there and can confirm Nokia (previously known as Alcatel Lucent) is Cellphone infastructure.
Do you mean David Sacks, the AI czar?
Yes, sorry
> I think the US Gov probably "incentizied" Nvidias stake in Intel, and I wonder if they did here as well.
If you wanted something in the x86 space it was either Intel or AMD. AMD is a direct competitor. If I was Nvidia I'd have done something about Intel. At least stop them from crashing further.
Diversify before the AI money dries up.
AI hardware really is the new oil, this sort of thing reminds me of the saudis.
The stock of NVIDIA can buy the 230 smallest S&P 500 companies. Which are still quite big companies. I recently learned this fact and I think it is pretty wild.
Do you mean their market cap? Sure but that doesn’t equal their profits or cash reserves which are considerably less so NVIDIA couldn’t buy the 230 companies even if I wanted to
They could buy with stock. They can do this limitless times each time an effective merger.
The SP500 could merge into one company, regulation permitting.
That’s a good point, which immediately makes me curious — how many of the smallest sp500 companies could nvidia outright purchase (or obtain a majority stake in)? It’s just a curiosity, not trying to demand an answer. I might look at it tomorrow if I have time
Its' getting more crazy by the day. Today NVidia added >300B USD in market cap. That's enough more than the valuation of Intel for example. Or more than Toyota. That 1B USD investement was money well spent !
This is also why them collapsing will take out the US stock market
In year 2000, Nokia had a market cap of around $100 billion and Nvidia had a market cap of around $2 to 4 billion.
Nvidia just made graphics cards, at a time when games were still being written for MS-DOS. Nobody was to imagine the real money to be made from repurposing these graphics cards for crypto and now this AI 'application'.
And even the games market.
Each of them separately, or all of them together?
If it were separately, they’d be able to buy 499 of S&P 500 companies…
Maybe they got so much money with the AI boom that they don't know anymore what to do with the cash at hand and so starts to invest it in direct now.
they need to ensure future, potential customers and the best way to do that is to own them and tell them to buy your goods.
in five years, NVDA's business strategy will be like CocaCola's, forcing bottlers to buy their syrups.
I was reading an article earlier today that said passive investing is more than 50% of the market--and since most ETFs allocate by market cap, it causes a reinforcing feedback loop for market cap leaders.
Passive investing is not an issue, but the default bias towards large cap equities like SP500, Nasdaq100. Passive investing through total market ETFs (like VTI) maintains the status quo.
For example, if they are only two companies, say with 1T and 4T market cap. If one invests 5M into a total market ETF, 1M is allocated to company A and 4M to company B. But since company B is 4x bigger than company A, the upward price pressure is the same for both companies.
What is the mechanism behind that?
In a hypothetical market with 100% ETFs, you’d have a status quo.
Edit: maybe not, since you have ETFs that invest in, say, Nasdaq only, which is tech oriented and would influence S&P500.
The problem is that companies with large market cap will get more of any subsequent investment because many fund's allocate new money by current market cap.
If you ever played Risk, or most other games, once the snowball starts, it's hard to stop it.
Of course, since the market has never been like this before, it's a speculation...
Interesting move. Nvidia’s already owning the AI hardware space, and now teaming with Nokia shows telecoms want a piece of it too. Feels like the next battle is about who controls the data pipes, not just the chips.
I was thinking more that they already own Mellanox, so it makes sense to buy into a networking company. Nokia still makes telecom gear, but they also make switches and routers.
Add to the list of AI cash merry go round [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3JfOxx6Hh4
This isn't the gotcha everyone in the media thinks it is.
Nvidia is using its revenues to quickly invest in bets that are simultaneously customers.
If anything, it's a triple win.
- taking advantage of cash it needs to deploy
- making new investments in areas NVidia wants to shape
- making new customers that continue to buy Nvidia GPUs, especially if they're successful
Some of these ventures may fail, but it's better than distributing dividends or issuing stock buybacks if you believe this technology will be useful in the future.
Companies doing this purely off of equity, stock valuation, and product/services agreements are even smarter as they're using pure hype to fund strategy.
Cooking your books and calling it a "triple win" is certainly interesting. Nokia just diluted their shares in hopes that AI hype keeps the price pumped up. They do keep the $1B so I guess we'll see what they do with it (other than buying NVDA GPUs, of course)
I always forget that Nokia bought out Siemens part of "Nokia Siemens Networks" and it is now just "Nokia networks".
And they also bought Alcatel-Lucent.
Nokia today is sort of “everybody who was making networks in Europe and North America except Ericsson”.
Based on the stock price, some people knew it already a week ago :-)
What exactly is "AI-RAN"?
The radio access network (RAN) is all the RF part of a mobile network: towers, base stations, the signals between our phones and the towers, phone-to-satellite comms (non-terrestrial network or NTN).
AI-RAN uses AI/ML for adaptive behaviors and optimizations in all these links.
For example, fine-grained RF and modulation details, called the channel state information (CSI), is constantly being exchanged between a phone and a base station. The volume of information creates transmission latencies. Using autoencoder models, this information can be semantically compressed to reduce its volume and decoded with high fidelity on the other side.
That's just one example. In the upcoming 6G, RAN will be "AI-native", using AI/ML everywhere. The standards may require AI accelerator chips in most base stations, NTN satellites, phones, and other elements.
It's the name given to an initiative by telco vendors like Nokia and Ericson to explore using NVIDIA GPUs to supply the core compute needs of next generation Radio Access Networks (RAN).
It's a potential 6G architecture.
ITT: Bubblers in full force!
Does this signal the a big market for AI processing is at the edge?
That growing narrative regarding all these AI-centric companies "funding each other" is beginning to look a lot like Attrition.org's (former) sexchart..
Given 5g patent mostly h, usa has missed the boat. Somehow has to find its way back or be dominated. Not necessarily can build an empire or even a duopoly… but at least stay in the game like Intel. Understandable from usa point of view.
Why? I don't get what's in it for Nvidia or Nokia?
AI on IoT devices?
Quietly supplying telecom equipment all this time, it really isn't the Nokia most know. Crazy that Nokia is still even a thing. Who noticed that logo had even changed (two years ago in 2023).
Honestly, I feel like this is what Nokia always was, and why they fell behind in consumer tech
The bubble burst is going to be devastating for these smaller companies caught up in the frenzy. I'm staying invested in companies like Alphabet that are taking part in the race but offer more than just AI hopium.
Microsoft (Elop and Ballmer) ruined Nokia's cell phone line that led to massive layoffs.
Let's see if this investment leads to the final elimination of an EU tech company. Why does Finland permit this?
Microsoft did no such thing. Nokia is very directly responsible for its own cell phone failings.
This line of thought really needs to die.
The Nokia board hired Elop from Microsoft because they wanted to bet the company on the Microsoft phone, full stop.
If you want to assign blame, then its on Nokia for wanting to pursue that strategy.
As someone that was an employee at the time, I am also fed up with the anti-Microsoft narrative.
Also there are some errors there, Windows Phone only became an alternative after the burning platform memo, that wasn't at all well received neither internally, nor by the 3rd party devs that had just started to migrate their Symbian tooling yet again, this time to Qt + PIPS + Carbide.
The biggest blame with the board, as revealed on the Finish press, was the bonus clause on Elop contract to sell Nokia Mobile business.
yes Nokia had years to come up with a better OS and they didn't. Even Samsung failed at this endeavor years later.
Nokia never executed on a touch screen OS. If i remember their final attempt with a Linux based OS was considered "good", but it was too little, too late. It was already over when they were scooped up by Microsoft, who were desperate themselves.
Pretty sure Nokia was glad to offload the handset business so they could feed money into markets they were still competitive in.
Yes they did, a few Symbian models used touch, as did original Maemo device that only did wlan initially.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7710
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770_Internet_Tablet
All the Symbian devices used resistive touch screens, though, didn't they? E.g. the Sony Ericsson Vivaz. So the user experience was not quite the same as with capacitive touch.
It is still touch, and yes you could use finger nails as well on those models.
However you have not read the links, not all models were alike.
> The Nokia 7710 is a mobile phone developed by Nokia and announced on 2 November 2004.[1] It was the first Nokia device with a touchscreen
That isn't really true. The N9 was definitely ahead of it's time with a buttonless gesture based UI similar to the modern iPhone.
Nokia's market cap is over $40B, so $1B is not really Microsoft level coup. At least yet.
Nokia has been teetering on the edge for a period, so they would welcome such an investment.
Nokia has been at the edge of the abyss for a period, and then they made a giant leap forward /s
To be fair Nokia, like Blackberry, was effed the moment iPhone launched. Elop hastened the decline but it was coming regardless.
It wasn't iPhone that doomed Nokia, it was Android. All of the sudden all Nokia's competitors could ship fairly good touch screen phones, while previously Nokia had a virtual monopoly on advanced mobile operating systems (barring BlackBerry in the US).
Granted, it was going to happen anyway, probably through Microsoft if Google hadn't commoditized that market first.
It's not quite the same, BlackBerry was mostly a 'phone' company and not a 'full telecom' company, in terms of hardware the produced. Nokia has other products that are more b2b than b2c.
Nokia has existed for over a hundred years. The success of its phones made it a major name and a ton of money in the early 2000s. Its other lines of business have continued to operate quietly. But it's no longer the force it was.
MSFT accelerated the invetiable.
There was just no way Nokia could match Apple on the OS who spent years prior to the idea of a smartphone making it a good match for the hardware of the time. And MSFT deservedly got punished for not investing in creating a better OS and Apple deservedly rewarded for doing so.
They may never have had the chance to beat Apple but they could certainly have bet on Android instead of Windows Phone and today they probably would have been in a different place like Samsung.
Finally. NOK to the moon. Now do BB.
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