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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

I suppose we're now entering the era where Nvidia is so big and wealthy that they will join the other kings (e.g. FAANG+) in being acquisition machines. The contemporary regulatory environment may make this an interesting thing to watch. I suspect that they'll (by that I mean most tech companies) have to get these acquisitions done earlier while the companies are even smaller if they are to get past regulators.

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We are well into that era already. Nvidia tried to buy ARM from softbank but was blocked by regulators a few years ago.

It's amazing that a company known for video game graphics cards is now a $2 trillion company. Nvidia's market cap ( over 2 trillion ) is the 2nd biggest of the FAANG+. It's bigger than Google. It's bigger than Amazon. Only Apple has a bigger market cap. And most of nvidia's market cap gains has been in the past year. It's unique for being the only predominantly hardware company of the group.

I think Nvidia would argue their software is at least as valuable to their market position as Apple's is.

Microsoft is missing from your list. And if Nvidia is predominantly hardware, so is Apple.

Nvidia is a software company that happens to make their own chips. This has been their mantra for the last 15 years.

I thought they paid TSMC to make chips they design. Just like Apple.

Both Apple and Nvidia use TSMC for chip manufacturing. Actually Apple might do a lot more of the hardware themselves, and more varied. Nvidia is just a design house, chips at TSMC and the surrounding electronics by many partners like Asus or Gigabyte.

It makes sense from the perspective if they are buying with equity. Their stock being at such heights its like getting a huge discount on your purchases and it barely goes on the balance sheet. The question always remains if the purchase was worth it - always tbd.

Nvidia is the actual N in FAANG. Netflix is not a technological powerhouse compared to Nvidia

Netflix was included because they were a hypergrowth SV tech stock, paying crazy compensations, not because it was a tech powerhouse.

When FAANG was created, Netflix was the highest gainer in the S&P 500. FAANG was the highest growth stocks that year, and nothing more.

Also Netflix had greater ambitions back then which would be proven to be a red herring when they first spun out Roku and secondly focused on becoming “HBO before HBO can become us”. Reed probably didn’t have the chops for it, but one can imagine what Netflix could have actually become if it tried to build platforms.

Netflix is definitely a technological powerhouse, it just we, mortals, can't benefit from it.

I am expecting Groq acquisition or merger at some point. I just makes sense. Especially considering the financial position of Nvidia right now.

Nvidia's footprint is more specific and obtuse than the other FAANG+s, so I expect they'll have an easier time with acquisition regulatory approval on the edges of their business model.

If they wanted to acquire an ML chip company, sure, but I/P/SaaS value adds will probably sail through.

They tried to buy ARM, and usa, eu, gb and china both said no. Lol poor nvidia. (I was so hyped for them, nvidia creating an arm desktop platform, and samsung/qualcomm/mediatek going against wintel, but that's not gonna happen now.)

i doubt NVIDIA main business have lots of differences, and this acquisition make sense both as add on for their product ecosystems (lock in) or too trying to pivot too cloud base solution.

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