It's more how little the Frankfurt stock Exchange is worth. And European devs keep wondering why our wages are lower than in the US for the same work. That's why.
While I would enjoy a US tech salary, I'm not sure we want a world where all manufacturing is set aside to focus on the attention economy.
Nvidia value deserves to be much higher than any company on the DAX (maybe all of them together, as it currently is) - but how much of that current value is real rather than an AI speculation bubble?
Nvidia sells chips ...
The reason Nvidia's value has been so inflated is the software stack and the lock-in they offer. CUDA, CuDNN, that's where Nvidia's value lies.
And obviously, now that all relevant ML frameworks are designed for Nvidia's software stack, Nvidia has a monopoly on the supply. That's why their value is being inflated so much.
And Nvidia doesn't have produce the chips themselves, that's all contracted out as well.
This, as the kids say, is just cope. American big tech makes real products. Google is not just ads. Apple is not. Amazon is not. Tesla is not. NVidia is not. Netflix is not.
NVidia might be overvalued because of the current AI hype but that does not diminish their real accomplishments!
Europe has almost no real tech companies. There is one exception, founded in 1984. Not exactly a spring chicken. How can a wealthy continent with 750 million people produce no big tech companies? It's a big problem.
Much more difficult to scale a product across 26 different countries and nearly as many languages and regulatory jurisdictions. US is one country, not a collection of countries fighting each other, meaning your product is instantly available to 300M people speaking the same language under (nearly) the same regulations.
It's a single market on paper as the eu only mandates a small subset of common rules and regulations such as removing tarrifs or freedom of movement, but have you ever tried in practice to launch your company from Belgium to France or from Netherlands to Belgium or from Austria to Germany, or from Romania to Italy?
It's much more difficult when the rubber hits the road as every country has various extra laws and protectionist measures in place to protect it's domestic players from outsiders even if they came from within the EU. And that's besides the language barrier which means added costs. This is much less efficient than the US market.
EU countries and voters still value their national sovereignty and culture (both with the upsides and downsides) above a united EU under the same laws and language for everyone, ruled from outside their country's borders. See what happened with Brexit and the constant internal squabbling and sabotaging over critical EU issues that affect us all like the war in Ukraine or illegal mass migration. An US style unification just won't work here since every little country wants to be it's own king while having its cake and eating it too.
California has more burdensome regulations and higher taxes than other states and yet it's home to silicon valley.
We're talking about scaling internal companies across EU, not about imports and exports. And scaling local start-up across the EU is a regulatory and legal nightmare for small companies.
Shipping and selling imports and exports of commodities are a solved problem for decades, but scaling a on-line notary service for instance, that works both in Germany and in Italy, isn't. The EU doesn't help much with that as they only say you should have no tariffs between each other, not that you shouldn't have various legal, cultural and bureaucratic protectionism idiosyncrasies in place. The EU won't and can't force countries to improve that to make doing business easier for cross-country start-ups.
EU countries have a lot more roadblocks between each others than US states do when ti comes to scaling businesses.
Obviously there is a lot to criticize about the EU and I can offer you a gigantic list there too. However, I do not see any clear failure of the EU’s approach as a single market so far. Additionally part of the philosophy was establishing peace in a region that was torn up by wars for a lot longer than Christianity exists. I would argue the EU was quite successful there too.
The US is a republic of 50 states. Each state has a huge amount of sovereignty and autonomy. There are 50 state-level regulatory jurisdictions. Not to mention the local-level of government.
But in spite of this, the US does not over-regulate. This is the big difference to Europe (I say this as an American expat living in Europe).
Currently EU welfare systems are under massive strain and huge waiting lists due to ageing population and economy that hasn't kept up to fund it.
There's no free lunch here. You need big companies with scale that pay huge wages as those mean a lot more tax revenue. Saying no to that kind money out of some made up idealism is just silly copium.
The EU income taxes paid by a single FANG salary employee would be the equivalent of the taxes paid by ~10 average workers. Pretty sure Germany and every other EU country would like to have such taxpayers contributing into the welfare system and not say no to it.
Europe's share of global GDP gas been on a constant decline at the expense of US and Chinese growth. Yeah it's nice to have a better welfare system than China or the US, but how will you fund it in the future if you keep having less money? Political idealism doesn't pay your food and rent.
European economic production is nowhere near high enough and now Europe is struggling to provide for its aging population and doesn't have enough good jobs for younger people. I support redistribution generally, but the wealth has to be created first or there won't be anything to redistribute.
Also in terms of tech innovation: What part of the US-based tech innovation couldn't have been (and actually were) achieved with open-source solutions many many years earlier for a fraction of the cost, if we didn't have copyright?
Honestly, a significant chunk of the "innovation" seems to relate directly to maximizing advertisement opportunities and inducing increased consumption. Who cares if a website takes a second to load rather than 0.1 seconds? If it has content I want, 1 second isn't a big deal. If I don't care about the content, I lose nothing by being distracted by something else in that 1 second.
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More importantly:
European Economic production isn't high enough... by what standard?
https://data.oecd.org/lprdty/gdp-per-hour-worked.htm
GDP per hour worked is 74 in the US vs 69 in Germany and 54 in the EU. And the EU includes many large countries that emerged from communist dictatorship only 35 years ago, and are very much still in the process of catching up. Incidentally, the German economy is the result of the West German economy with 63 million people absorbing a failing economy hosting 16 million people in 1990.
The idea that the US is some promised land of economic prosperity while Europe is falling is entirely absurd. It's a narrative built on small relative differences and a US system that pressures people into working a lot more than Europeans do.
More importantly, even GDP per Capita wise:
https://data.oecd.org/gdp/gross-domestic-product-gdp.htm
EU per Capita GDP in 2022 is the same as USA 2016. Was the USA in 2016 struggling but now isn't?
This is all bullshit. Economic output is more than high enough and rising steadily. The problem remains solely in the distribution of
Absolutely the US would be struggling if the GDP was still 2016 values with today’s costs.
So it boggles my mind that your parent tried to make a point by equating USA 2016 with EU 2022 GDP/capita as if nothing's wrong with that. Are some people that oblivious?
Nominal: https://data.oecd.org/gdp/gross-domestic-product-gdp.htm
PPP/Inflation adjusted not so much: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...
But pretty much all countries are still well ahead of where we were in 2017. If you feel poorer than in 2017 it's because you're getting less of a larger pie, not because the economy is producing less than it did then.
> More importantly, even GDP per Capita wise: > > https://data.oecd.org/gdp/gross-domestic-product-gdp.htm > > EU per Capita GDP in 2022 is the same as USA 2016. Was the USA in 2016 struggling but now isn't? > > This is all bullshit. Economic output is more than high enough and rising steadily. The problem remains solely in the distribution of the ouptut.
The conclusion that economic output has been rising steadily, even in the last couple of years, is true. But the 2016 vs 2022 numbers are nominal, thus useless. There is a much more significant difference over time when working in PPP/Inflation adjusted numbers:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...
The overall point holds though: The economic output of the EU is at 45K per capita today, the level of the US in 1997. The US was not a poor country in 1997. Germany is at the economic output per capita of 2009.
Did the US in 1997 suffer from the problem that it didn't produce enough economic output? Of course not.
And given that, adjusting for inflation, GDP per capita is at an all-time high, the conclusion that you're poorer because economic production is distributed to others is necessarily true. And it tracks, too. Corporate profits and the Dow Jones are not down. The already extremely wealthy have accumulated nearly two thirds of the new wealth being created since 2020:
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/richest-1-bag-nearly...
> Billionaire wealth surged in 2022 with rapidly rising food and energy profits. The report shows that 95 food and energy corporations have more than doubled their profits in 2022. They made $306 billion in windfall profits, and paid out $257 billion (84 percent) of that to rich shareholders. The Walton dynasty, which owns half of Walmart, received $8.5 billion over the last year. Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, owner of major energy corporations, has seen this wealth soar by $42 billion (46 percent) in 2022 alone.
Given these facts, if we have to accept lower economic production in the name of a fairer distribution of economic production, that seems more than acceptable to me.
But those are all low-marin chips. Qualcomm, Nvidia, Intel, AMD and Apple have much higher margins on their chips. They don't bother competing with the EU chips companies.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F3PGpsrWEAEiplB?format=jpg&name=...
Unless you want to say that the US was much poorer in 2017 than it was in 2022 that's a fairly ridiculous statement.
Also, the highest productivity places in the EU have much lower hours worked per capita than the US, with Germans on average working 25% less than Americans and the EU as a whole working 13% less than the US.
European Union gdp per capita for 2022 was $37,433, a 3.33% decline from 2021.
U.S. gdp per capita for 2022 was $76,330, a 8.7% increase from 2021.
It's not even close?
For example Ireland has by a long margin the highest GDP/capita in the whole EU, and it would make you think the average Irish worker earns more that any other worker in the EU and drives a Lambo, but that's not what's happening. It's because most US corporations funnel their EU money through their Irish holding companies skewing the statistic.
No, Luxembourg does.
World bank data in PPP dollars is reported as 64,600 vs 45,900 here:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...
Germany is at 53,900 there, but a good chunk of the difference is simply that US works more per capita. GDP per hour worked is 74$ in the US vs 69$ in Germany, 53$ in Canada. Sweden is ahead of the US. And the EU also includes countries like Bulgaria, which at 29$ is barely ahead of Russias 28$.
https://data.oecd.org/lprdty/gdp-per-hour-worked.htm
France is at 65$ per hour worked, but Germany and France also have significantly lower poverty and inequality rates by any measure you chose, with France more equal than Germany.
The US, of course, remains the dominant economy of the world by any measure. There is no question of that. But the exponential nature of economics, and the structural differences between these different economies, means that GDP numbers compared directly are fairly meaningless.
Edit: That last sentence is too strong as stated. GDP obviously matters a big deal in the grand scheme of things, especially as you jump from lower or middle income to high income countries. But it's all logscale. A factor of 2 is a big deal, a factor of 1.2 might not be.
Can't edit anymore, but: That were nominal numbers, and thus useless. See here:
The only real answer is protectionism, and there's a good chance that'll hurt more than it helps.
Bad example given how aggressively they terminate products which don't generate the same revenue as ads.
> Apple is not.
Best example, they have done a fantastic job of being both a tech company and pseudo-fashion company.
> Amazon is not.
They don't make anything (at least nothing people want to buy) and have ad revenue as an increase slice of their pie.
> Tesla is not.
Even bigger hype/speculation vehicle than Nvidia.
> NVidia is not.
Nvidia of 5 years ago would not have appeared on this list, being too much of a niche tech company. Good at what they do, but hugely hype-fuelled.
> Netflix is not.
Running out of growth potential with their current business model, starting to introduce ads!
For all his insanity, the one thing I respect Musk for, is that he actually started successful companies that make stuff. Creating a new car manufacturer of the scale of BMW out of nothing was widely considered impossible before.
Of course he did this from a position of extreme wealth, but none of his peers managed to do that. Everyone else is just seeking rent by trying to be first to implement some tech transition that is coming anyway. And that might be a lot more valuable to society if it was managed differently...
Not to be snarky, but if AWS counts as “nothing” I’d sure like a slice of nothing please.
If I pay for a database server in Virginia, how is that not real?
Cloud services don’t just exist on their own accord. Datacenters are physical and real!
How do you define "tech"? Europe's domestic markets are jam-packed full of local tech companies.
Europe has many small and not very profitable tech companies. Almost no large and profitable ones. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GNDtCtTXcAAiwFk?format=jpg&name=...
Most of them are just payment middlemen not some innovative product nobody else can do, and Spotify survives on monopolizing and squeezing artists, not some innovative product. Kind of like Netflix except Netflix has some cutting edge streaming tech as a product not just IP licenses.
ASML is the only product innovator there except their innovative EUV lightsources are licensed from Sandia labs in the US and made by Cymer in the US which ASML bought and licensed to not seel to China. So an US invention at the end of the day.
Adyen is very underrated, and Spotify is definitely tech.
Stripe should be on the list. DeepMind at one point.
It's just much cheaper and easier for start-ups if you're developing a SW product to sell it in the US market first and only when you've made money there, slowly bring it in the EU.
Starting off SW products in the EU is suicide (unless you're targeting some niche in the local market that's safe from competitors from abroad because it ties into some local idiosyncrasies on language, culture and law).
I mean, by definition given that it trades freely their market cap is real. Your market cap today is what the market thinks your future cash flows are worth. The bubble and the bubble popping should in theory both be priced into Nvidia's market cap.
What isnt' is events the market doesn't anticipate, AMD coming out with a current generation chip that can do inference as well as the H100 is something the market hasn't priced in.
Andy our manufacturing example is very poor as NVidia is certainly part of the manufacturing pipe line by designing physical products that people buy.
I think probability of that would still be priced in. Not sure what the exact probability is, though.
But if say it was clear that AMD can come up with a competitive option, then NVDA stock would drop. But if it was clear the other way that AMD can't do it, NVDA price would increase.
This is a bit of a tired viewpoint, and is evidently proven not true time after time. The collective despair/euphoria of market participants is extremely powerful and well documented, at least as far back as dutch tulips.
Stock valuations are relative, and they are relatively misvalued most of the time. That's why there are (albeit rare) funds that are capable of outperforming the market for decades - Berkshire, and Medallion for example.
It's certainly possible that AMD is valued (almost) fairly. It's just as likely that it's relatively misvalued for no reason other than emotions (lack of hype).
Nvidia sells physical things, and they are bigger than 40 companies because the companies are selling physical things?
I am not arguing hardware scales better than software but this is a strange argument in this context.
Nah, then ill get my very good wagie pennies here and have plenty jobs available, plus good health insurrance and whatnot.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2024/06/PE24_217_132.html
Please stop breaking HN rules. I never said that. HN rules state you need to reply to the strongest interpretation of someone's argument, not the weakest that's easiest to criticize.
I just pointed out once country's economics performance for comparison, if you're want to extrapolate from that that you should move there, that's your issues to deal with, but not my argument.
But there's a long list of German companies not on the DAX
(though Germany DAX really deserves to be worth less than NVidia)
Not to be too nitpicky here but these are only the publicly traded companies. You have a number of pretty large German companies that are still entirely private such as Aldi, Schwarz Group, Boehringer or Bosch.
https://www.famcap.com/top-500-german-family-businesses-the-...
Not all of those are listed, or listed in Frankfurt