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Comment by cmiles8 | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia is turning into a savings and loan company that happens to design computer chips on the side. What could possibly go wrong.

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As it's said... "Every company eventually becomes a bank."

Interesting. Never heard this before. Could you please explain this?

Soon the GPUs will just be the promotional gift you get for opening a sufficiently large Nvidia financing account

Wait until you hear about how airlines work, you'll start babbling about the rewards-points bubble

Well, they fully control miles and constantly devalue them. On the other hand, Nvidia isn't Federal Reserve yet...

That’s broadly known and at least they clearly account for it in their numbers, without all the “special financing vehicle” off balance sheet stuff that’s become common in the AI bubble era.

The loans will just take longer to repay. There is a market for Anthropic & OpenAI, it just likely doesn't have the 200B profit each year required for the maths to make sense.

If shit hits the fan, the companies collapse, then Nvidia gets their money from the investors anyways.

NV might end up owning them.

Buying the team and then actually making the models open is an interesting avenue for driving hardware demand (basically making openai models the new nemotron).

Unlikely but quite interesting.

OpenAI might actually end up being open after all... bit of a roundabout way though.

> If shit hits the fan, the companies collapse, then Nvidia gets their money from the investors anyways.

Is Nvidia guaranteeing the financing because OpenAI doesn’t have investor cash to pay the costs outright?

Nvidia is guaranteeing OpenAI's financing because, at a high level, people are more willing to lend/invest money with a profitable company than one losing money.

And Sam Altman needs a new source of financing because the US government is getting squirrelly about him continuing to raise capital from the Middle East in exchange for technology transfer.

They don't need $200B profit for the math to make sense. Where are you getting that?

Anthropic is expected to IPO around $2T valuation.

That's around half Google's value, and Google's profit is around $130B.

So using the same P/E ratio as Google that implies $65B profit.

Of course Google is a mature company and Anthropic is growing revenue faster than any company in history so you'd expect Anthropic to have a higher P/E ratio than Google which means a lower profit to justify that valuation.

In any cay startups are valued on revenue rather than profit so that's the real number people will be looking at.

Hurr durrr.

99.9% of you should stop doing valuation, especially since you don't know truly 'comparable firms' are.

Lazy slop. Worse than LLMs.

I'm hoping when the shit hits the fan, you can get a sick GPU for cheap.

More likely is communities will end up with a bunch of half-built abandoned datacenter projects.

Isn't that what they said?

I think a more likely scenario is that GPU time in the cloud will be very cheap. If LLM use/profitability doesn't follow the expected path, new deep learning applications could be heavily subsidised.

it'll be a rack based GPU without video ports. The only thing getting sick GPU's will be landfill when they all burn out and the data center rationalization happens.

More like rack-sized GPU that takes in half-megawatt of power as 800 volts DC, and requires 10 gallons per second of liquid cooling or it'll catch fire.

Looks like I'll have to get back into casemodding then

Nope. The scientific community is eagerly waiting for prices to drop.

Single 5090, single H100, a few 4090s, a few Blackwell PRO 6000... that's all there often is as dedicated devices for a faculty (apart from the oversubscribed bigger clusters with big stuff).

Apart from the chairs doing vision, most of them use them headless. So, landfill will be highly unlikely, if things get sold fast enough.

as the ml phd student who volunteered to be the admin for the gpu servers, that list is pretty accurate.

Totally agree these won’t go to consumers but even after a crash I’d home they are able to be sold for parts and not just to landfills. If this all goes into the trash that would be even more tragic than it already is.

> Totally agree these won’t go to consumers but even after a crash I’d home they are able to be sold for parts and not just to landfills. If this all goes into the trash that would be even more tragic than it already is.

I'm not an accountant (so I could be wrong), but I'm vaguely under the impression it's sometimes financially beneficial to "write off" inventory, and to do that you have to destroy the items (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial, https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/05/30/apples-lisa-entom...).

So I kinda wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of these GPUs go in the dump, given that it sounds like they'd be extremely power-hungry and difficult to use outside a hyperscale data center setting.

I went down a rabbit hole of refurbing burnt out crypto gpus. It’s really not too complicated but can be hit or miss. Need to get a box full.

The proper server AI chips come on a board that isn't compatible with consumer pcie lanes and have no built-in fans. Completely different ball game in the ultra dense server world.

> rack based GPU without video ports

Still fine for running APL with the dfns compiler, Futhark or other array languages directly hosted on the GPU itself!

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