Hacker News Reader

Comment by matwood | Hacker News Reader

Meta spent ~1/3 of it's capex last year on GPUs. Are they going to spend more than 11B+ in future years? The big few companies that make up a huge portion of NVDA's revenue could just hold spend steady and NVDA will contract [1].

NVDA is also in a weird spot where their primary customers are all working to build their own thing to replace/supplement NVDA. A lot like Apple did with ARM, eventually pushing Intel completely out. As algos improve and Moores law marches forward, companies will need fewer of the 'best' GPUs and get by with their in-house versions.

[1]https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/03/14/the-scariest-nvidi...

View on HN

As long as CEOs will try to convince the public/investors probabilistic word generators are a type of intelligence, the need for the biggest and strongest GPUs will continue to show how much closer you are to AGI

If they ever give up that lie, we could see a contraction

I’ll give it 18 months. Maybe 12.

> A lot like Apple did with ARM, eventually pushing Intel completely out.

Apple has the unique advantage of controlling the entire stack. Anyone who wants to compete with NV on anything AI has the disadvantage of NV's full stack - OS drivers, acceleration drivers, userland libraries, compute kernels - being extremely well developed, whereas everyone else's is a bunch of crap.

We are still early in the slow process of AI/ML percolating from the FAANGs all the way down to your neighborhood boutique software shop. Even if the hyperscalers stop buying Tesla, the demand lower in there chain will just grow.

Yeah but what else did Meta spend a ridiculous amount of capex on recently, can you remember? The tens of billions it spent on the metaverse were dead money and its AI ambitions could amount to the same given Meta really doesn’t have much to do with its cash other than keep Facebook and Insta on 99.999999999 uptime.

Sure, and Meta might keep blowing 11B+/year on new GPUs. But, NVDA needs growth. They need Meta and MS and AWS and Google to spend 20%+ more/year on new GPUs and/or find new customers who can/will drop Billions/year on new GPUs. We're talking staggeringly large $.

And that's not even mentioning that anyone with that sort of money is already developing their own GPUs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com