Nvidia takes $5B stake in Intel under September agreement
reuters.com
reuters.com
1. US Government
2. Nvidia
3. Softbank
Interesting turn of events for the company...
> 1. US Government
> 2. Nvidia
> 3. Softbank
Not quite. (1) US Govt at 9.9% (2) BlackRock at 8.4% (3) Vanguard at 8.3% (4) State Street Corp probably (5) Nvidia (6) Softbank at 2%
Otherwise these few companies are the largest holders of basically every security in existence.
> Otherwise these few companies are the largest holders of basically every security in existence.
Indeed. Due to inclusion of Intel in S&P500 index funds and ETFs.
Together, institutional investors own over 50% of Intel Corporation, giving them a significant collective influence on major board decisions. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/67-institutional-ownership-in...
A company can own lots of things (assets, IP, real estate, share of other companies), but shareholders of the company don't own or have direct access to that thing. If Intel pays dividends, it will go to Nvidia, not you. If Intel holds a shareholder vote, Nvidia leadership will be the one voting, and they don't have to listen to your opinion. They can also change or sell the holding without your permission.
If you own shares of Intel through a Vanguard fund, you do have actual ownership of Intel. You can cast a vote same as every other shareholder. The dividend they issue will be passed on to you. Vanguard is simply acting as a proxy.
So I generally think wha is more useful is saying in what particular ways “individual investor” is meant when it is used in debate, decision-making, etc.
The individual human called Citizens United is casting a side eye.
It seems a layer of indirection that is more harmful than useful.
We limit liability for risky ventures for a reason.
Because the investor class had the political powers to get that protection written into law for themselves, so as to externalize risks while privatizing rewards.
Would you rather the only entity with a monopoly on violence be liable for all risky ventures? What happens when the government has a very different ideology and goals than what you support?
Again, there is a reason the status quo of private capital doing risky business with limited liability tends to work better.
You don’t have to like it.
Otherwise the liability wouldn't be limited. You'd have to pay all your debts.
I agree. That was not the point I was making.
The government interferes here for good reason, as no one would start a business if they would be personally responsible for random things. The LL in LLC is Limited Liability. Most governments want to make it easy to start a business.
This is the status quo because it has been consistently better than the government doing everything and being liable for everything. With private companies, you have various branches of the government with some ability to correct or regulate matters when a private entity is liable or responsible for something.
In the alternative scenario, when something goes wrong and the government is liable, good luck getting the government to find itself liable.
People started businesses for a very long time before limited liability existed. Heck, people continue to start businesses as general partnerships and sole proprietorships to this day, despite the fact that those forms do not feature limited liabiity, centuries after limited liability was first applied to some business forms. So, “no one would start a business if they would be personally responsible” is very clearly false.
No, that's not even remotely true; private investment in business ventures with risk long predates limited liability being attached to the corporate form. (In fact, it was the success the capitalist class achieved without that protection that enabled them to acquire the political power to get limited liability attached to the corporate form.)
Here you go - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottomry
Having an LLC doesn't get you much special protection. You could make equivalent contracts with some assets securing the loan and other assets not securing the loan. The main purpose of the LLC framework is to standardize the whole thing.
No, voluntary lending is not the only way that corporations acquire liabilities, either now or at the time of limited liability was attached to the form. For instance, tort liability is a thing.
Edit: sorry, that was very abrupt! Nice to have your input. I would be interested to hear what you think would be problematic about the Idea.
Also as with all corporate law questions, <other jurisdiction> allows it, so we'll just go there instead.
I'll try to stick to one thought at a time.
Requiring full disclosure of all ownership stakes, traceable back to individuals, is probably a better route for this.
And it seems that there's a trend towards that, last company I registered had a new process for listing beneficial ownership of all significant amounts. Just need to push that legislation further.
What do you see as the problem?
Technically I own the fund, and the fund owns the companies. As I understand your comment, this would be disallowed.
These don't seem difficult problems to me.
Full public disclosure of all beneficial ownership in entities would go a lot further, IMHO.
I think your full disclosure is actually fundamentally the same as my proposal.
You can allow mutual funds or ETFs or whatever similar instrument, but they should not be allowed to have a vote or say in the company.
If companies can't own companies, then instead I have to directly transfer ownership over the subsidiary to the shareholders of the primary company. That means they can sell their shares of the foreign subsidiary independently of the headquarters, and the two companies' ownership will diverge over time. I am effectively forced to IPO the foreign subsidiary at the moment of their creation.
You can't assign ownership to the current CEO or board members, because that creates a conflict of interest. They'd be able to take a US company they manage and turn it into a foreign subsidiary they own.
This would also make joint ventures, mergers, and acquisitions far more difficult and complicated, if not impossible.
That sounds fine to me. They're different companies. Why shouldn't I be able to sell my shares in Amazon UK while keeping them in Amazon France?
Or countries could come to some agreement on cross country companies.
Your last paragraph is pretty meaninglessness. In all those circumstances two companies just become one.
should other companies wish to buy your company, they could still buy all the assets of your company, but not the company itself.
Edit: I see a lot of confusion on the topic. The anti trust does not need to be from US to be essentially binding, UK, EU, etc have also a de facto veto on mergers of global companies, even if those are US based, this is especially true in global sectors like semiconductors where everybody depends on everybody else from patents to machinery.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/insider-says...
I wonder how AMD would have fared against Intel post-Conroe if Jensen was CEO. They were behind but still competitive until the Bulldozer flop, only recovering with Zen (and even then it took a few generations for Zen to mature).
Zen was a beast from day one. Zen 1 more or less matched Intel on single-core perf and outmatched it on multicore. Zen 1 blew Intel out of water on perf/$, so much so that the morning after booting up my Zen 1 computer, I bought as many AMD shares as I could afford.
And I don't really see the situation being that obviously different if it was Nvidia who they merged with and Jensen was CEO.
The big issue was simply that AMD didn't have the cash at hand to both pay for ATI and maintain investment in R&D, at least without their next few products completely dominating the competition. I don't see a different CEO changing that. Unless Jensen was willing to value Nvidia significantly less than ATI at the time.
Hindsight is 20/20. I suspect Zen chiplet success was a result of AMD's deliberate strategy of design partnership with other companies (XBox, PlayStation) and re-using IP[1]. Jensen might not have done the same road on partnerships, or may have chosen the Arm (Tegra) over doubling down on x86
1. There's an informative interview with Lisa Hsu from 2 years ago that lays out the strategy. It's not a big leap to imagine Infinity Fabric eas designed to increase design flexibility across disparate workloads. The impression I got from the multistage Apple-Nvida fallout is that Nvidia probably doesn't have a culture of accepting notes on it's products.
That's why, for example, any meaningful collaboration between Intel and Nvidia under this partnership has to be released in the form of an Intel product using Nvidia tech, rather than an Nvidia product using Intel tech.
Which is absolutely enormous, so this distinction is splitting hairs.
But believe what you like.
Intel needs expertise that only a few hundred people on Earth have, and most of them are in Taiwan, already working for someone else.
You don't just buy an EUV and start printing, you buy an EUV and give it to a wizard to use as a wand. Intel needs wizards.
None of this stuff is published (externally) and there are no discussion forums or stack overflows to help you either. You need to get through academia, prove yourself, and then you can start working on a chance to get access to the trade secrets that make it possible.
After all that you will be placed as a researcher on a handful of steps in the multi-thousand step process of making SOTA wafers. And probably not make crazy money, but at this point, you're not in it for the money anyway.
It's important to note that it wasn't always like this. Up until the mid-90s this stuff was all published in the open literature fairly quickly.
There has been a steady culture shift towards ultrasecrecy since then.
TSMC's market cap is US$ 1.560 Trillion
It turns out when you are manufacturing nvidia's GPUs, Google's TPUs, AMD's CPUs and GPUs, Apple's processors, and the flagship smartphone chips from Qualcomm, MediaTek and Broadcom - and none of them can go elsewhere because your products are so far ahead of the competitors - that's pretty valuable.
Convincing TSMC to sell you their chipmaking trade secrets? You might as well try to convince Apple to sell you their smartphone division.
This is something I don't understand. These companies make good profits -- why don't they pay their experts well?
They don’t make good profits. TSMC has fairly mediocre numbers by the standard of the tech industry. Intel has really bad numbers for the last several decades. AMD was having so much trouble with foundries that they spun it off.
That is actually a big part of how TSMC got ahead. It's a race. All those years of being able to get PhDs to work midnight-8am (because you're the most prestigious employer in the country, by far) move you to the next node just a bit faster. It adds up.
Why work smarter or harder? Do both!
Their latest node 18A is already in production and should be a lot closer to TSMC's latest and greatest, with the first products shipping early next year.
Its called the velocity of money, its a thing see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money
The problem is that there is all this capital and no place to put it, so yes it seems circular, but some of that is to be expected.
As for Burry, he recently called out the changes to how the big players are amortizing their capital expenses for all these data center build outs. He is correct in calling it out, but he's getting the wrong signal from it. Mores law died a long time ago, and now were basically hitting multiple walls at the same time: Node scaling at the chip fabs, power and cooling in the data center, and just more linear growth from product (because of all three factors).
Go back to 2008 ish time period. There were a lot of data centers that hit the wall with availability of power and cooling and they were hard problems to solve then. The solution was not to upgrade rather to "build new", and were seeing a lot of the same types of issues today.
Nvidia has unmaintainable margins, the memory manufacturing side is now in on the grift too... They are sucking up the profit while they can because the dip is going to be BRUTAL (likely a boon to consumers but neither here nor there).
This is the reason we moved to using money instead of a barter system.
If one succeeds, and grows 10-100x, you are profitable. If a few succeed, you double your market cap.
I specifically meant this circular investment idea is medium risk.
Of course Nvidia can tank if sales decline.
And the deals Nvidia are making are different from all of those. Buying OpenAI stock so that OpenAI can buy Nvidia's products is very risky. Buying the management team and IP of Groq is a very weirdly structured deal. What was the benefit to Groq? What is the purpose of this Intel deal?
I imagine it's a similar story. If Intel fails, Nvidia loses sales and this investment.
> The stake will make Nvidia one of Intel's largest shareholders, giving it roughly 4% of the company after new shares are issued.
Is that 4% still accurate?