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“as long as it’s cash flow continues” is doing a lot of optimistic heavy lifting. The whole premise of the circular financing worry is that Nvidia sits in the middle of all the guarantees made to companies like OpenAI. If any of those companies become insolvent, Nvidia is on the hook for it.

Also Nvidia isn’t really creating money. The 500B number is third party capital that already exists (BX, Apollo, etc).

M2 is $21 trillion, which is what the fed signed up to backstop. How much did NVDA sign up to backstop?

Monetarily Nvidia isn’t creating any money at all.

It would also follow that by increasing the money supply significantly they’re also contributing to inflation a great deal correct? (Given the rest of the economy is not growing at near the same rate as the AI industry)

Its stock could crash without causing–as long as its cash flows continue–a credit crisis through its investments and commitments

Uh, that’s a pretty load-bearing as long as its cash flows continue. The two things are surely correlated.

> The good news: I have seen no evidence Nvidia has borrowed against its stock or otherwise linked its equity value to these commitments.

Nvidia doesn't need it. It funds other companies. They do this thing that Nvidia doesn't do. It shows up on their balance sheets and Nvidia just gets to claim the valuation of the investment on its balance sheet.

It can't go tits up!

Well the key difference making any superficial similarities fall apart is Nvidia does not have neutral economy-wide goals of maintaining small+stable inflation, near-full employment and stabilizing financial institutions like the Fed does. Nvidia is entirely self interested in protecting their own shareholder value (that includes the incestuous web of investments ultimately ending up spent on their GPUs).

The structure of the Fed is setup the way it is to limit the sort of self-serving, myopic political micromanaging that could be damaging to the economy at large. And, unlike a beneficiary of rapid growth like Nvidia, has (historically) tried to identify potential indicators warning of unsustainable bubbles that could lead to financial contagion and tries to mitigate that risk using the limited monetary tools available and their public soapbox.

A similar decision making structure would potentially be very undesirable to Nvidia shareholders as caution over long time horizons would likely produce what they would consider an excessively conservative, defensive strategy to avoid putting too much air into the bubble too quickly (at the expense of their valuation).

USA is trying to become corporatocracy

In a country without religion, banner or ideology to unite the people in current-and-coming turbulent times, the bet is made on "unite under money, or have no money left"

the way to fight it is to be principled even in front of cheaper options - and to support others like you

The governments of today weren't formed out of "discussions of power"

Yeah its soooo interesting! Totally not dystopian, just soooo interesting and fascinating to ponder these scenarios in which corporations hold equal power to national governments!

Just such a curious scenario to let your mind wander about, how society would look like in these scenarios!

/s

I'm honestly so sick of the suspense of disbelief on this site, how is this more "interesting" to you, than the absolute sheer terror you should feel about going back to feudalism and serfdom? A typical western national state ensures that you have basic rights as a human being and aren't exploited to the death by non-government entities.

AMD would step in, they where behind nvidia but they've been closing that gap for a while and the 9070XT is the current value king (in this fucked up market) for mid-high gaming and you can actually buy them.

Demand for Nvidia cards has outstripped supply even on the mid-high cards specifically because they do better with local models than AMD cards with the same VRAM do broadly.

AI has completely broken the PC gaming market (and PC/Laptop market more broadly but gaming is really hit hard because it's the exact components that matter for both that overlap).

Nvidia had the mind share among gamers but so did Intel once, inertia only lasts so long they've been thoroughly intent on burning that to the ground for a while, back to the post 1080's

If RDNA5 is good (and 4 was it closed the gap on RT) they'll been in a solid place to take the spot if Nvidia do cede the ground.

I have a 7900XTX the last flagship card AMD did (about equal to a 9070XT for raster but 24GB VRAM not 16GB) and it has been and is a stellar card for gaming (let down only if you care about RT and the games I play don't have it).

Flawless under Linux, weaker on the AI behind nvidia but it runs Qwen surprisingly well and I didn't and don't care too much about that except to poke it occasionally.

> Also I don't think AMD and Intel is capable "to step in" to replace them.

It's kind of weird. nVidia kind of has the PC market cornered, but AMD has had the last couple of generations of Xbox and Playstation. Also, they power the Steam Deck/Machine, and Valve has been contributing a lot of AMD graphics features into the Linux drivers. There is a world where AMD (and maybe even Linux on AMD specifically) becomes the de facto standard for gaming.

Maybe this is silly of me, but maybe gaming would enjoy an era of hardware upgrades being rather unviable so the focus turns to optimization and aesthetic.

They're advertising DLSS5 just now though.

> I really don't think it's an if question but a when because it almost feels like an afterthought

I feel your reasoning is very weird. Are they losing money by selling consumer GPU? Just because the profit isn't that much compared to AI it doesn't mean that it's negative, and for-profit companies are not known for leaving money on the table. Apple doesn't reveal how much Apple TV+ makes for them either but I don't see it be gone anytime soon.

AAA gaming is cooked, and AMD/Intel is plenty able to support indie to AA needs.

A Chinese company like CXMT will surely fill that unaddressed market the way CXMT is doing for memory. It would be rather unwise for nvidia to leave the door to the market open. AMD is positioned well to grow right now due to their non-Apple sillicon unified ram hardware coming soon.

AMD and Intel would be HAPPY to replace them, and plenty capable.

Game consoles like PS5 have been AMD for a few generations. Steamdeck/Steam Machine are AMD.

But really, Nvidia has no reason to leave gaming behind. They can just start dialing back their ambition on the gaming side and providing GPUs that aren't too useful for inference or training. All gaming needs is stability so that devs can aim for something. Games looked great 20 years ago and they'll look great 20 years from now, as long as developers know what they are building for.

I kind of feel like this topples the house of cards a bit. What else is all the visual genAI tech for besides consumer entertainment?

It's still a 15B market for Nvidia, it's not nothing. But I'm curious how they're going to turn Rubin into a gaming GPU. I think at this point consumer GPU upgrades are going to be AI-related upgrades that happen to also help raster capabilities. Blackwell was already kind of a dud on performance uplift from Ada beyond the new LLM features.

Question: wouldn’t the fab be the actual bottleneck? In other words, why wouldn’t TSMC make more NVIDIA chips instead of AMD ones? I assume they’ll just do whichever is paying more, so if NVIDIA chips are better, gamers would be willing to pay more for them and in turn TSMC will be willing to make more of them?

> I wonder when they will give up on the gaming market because that could take down several publishers and developers.

It really shouldn't: the most money in games are those games that don't require high end GPUs.

You must not be paying attention, they already have.

Intel is going nowhere but we all knew that anyways.

And again, you must not be paying attention, AMD is doing exactly what they said they would. No flagship for RDNA4 (just like RDNA2), RDNA5 flagship (10900 XT) coming right on schedule

I think they'll keep the gaming market alive for a while because renting gaming hardware from the cloud (GeForce NOW) is very congruous with AI keeping consumer hardware prices sky-high.

It continues modern trend of chow companies don't want consumers to truly own anything. Finance a car, pay a monthly subscription fee for heated seats, rent a phone, stream a movie, get rid of physical media, rent a GPU.

But if GeForce NOW doesn't take off, and they get convinced that the AI bubble will not pop, I could see them pulling a Micron and ending their consumer product lines.

Eh, AMD makes a lot of video game console SoCs. If you look at the steam hardware survey most people are running ancient computers.

> I really don't think it's an if question but a when

Nvidia still will ship gaming products. The upcoming RTX Spark laptop APUs are still gaming-capable - we also have Blackwell gaming GPUs and the Nvidia-powered Nintendo Switch 2.

People echoed this sentiment during the crypto mining crunch, and we still got gaming hardware designs after that blew over. One of CUDA's core value props is the consumer market, and Nvidia probably won't surrender it unless hardware becomes unreasonably scarce.

> Also I don't think AMD and Intel is capable "to step in" to replace them

AMD has powered 2 generations each of Sony and Xbox consoles, Steam deck and shops a ton of GPUs especially if you count APUs. And then Intel literally ship more GPUs than Nvidia and AMD combined.

The gaming market doesn't need Nvidia. Especially as AAA is cratering.

They may allocate different number of resources every year based on market conditions but they'll never give up on gaming, that would be extremely silly.

> So let's say this big boogey man technology will end all life on earth and we all slow down together.

The first messenger from Anthropic is out with this exact message. Stop us (them) or everyone will be killed by 2030

https://youtu.be/i30jVPqQeOM?si=yosxw4MLoVtPW-7v

It's always funny to me when they do the fear-propaganda, e.g. A statement like "There's a 10% chance that AI will destroy humanity in a decade". If a government were for the people, it can reasonably react with "Okay - if that's the case, you should shut down. And if not you will be arrested. Because if this is true, you're willingly building equivalent of a nuclear bomb."

The frontier companies asking for regulation is somehow one of their less insane marketing ploy to date

Thank you

I view the market as celestial objects influencing each other through a lattice similar to spacetime

Everything influences each other with varying gravitational pull

At one point the mental model was more like a web, but spacetime with mass matches the model more closely

It’s Different This Time(tm)

https://www.dramexchange.com/

Considering that LIBOR was discontinued in 2023 after a scandal of manipulation and fraud, YES! It's back to the future.

CME is launching futures contracts for GPU compute: https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/energy/power/compute-future...

Quite a lot better than people originally thought. There is a LOT of demand for 5+ year old Ampere on the secondary market, and hyperscalers are still holding on to many of them since they can’t acquire new compute fast enough.

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/08/24/making-old-gpus-new-ag...

If you read between the lines, it was mostly about China.

> And what is TSMC in this analogy?

The mint?

A platform: aka the foundation under the bank.

The material cement that allows chips to exist above it.

And the platform is made of time: ours.

Idk… government bonds or something?

What’s upstream of the central bank? …Congress?

The currency press operator and manufacturer.

do they lend money to their customers to buy their own chips?

This is what I’m not getting - we’re spending more than the global gross sales of all software on the planet on AI, how much more software needs to be sold and for how much more to recoup?

> They don't take interest (usury)

Nvidia booked $496 million in interest income in Q2 alone [1].

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1045810/000104581026... page 15

yep, but click on the archiv.ph link. There you can read the article for free.

As the saying goes. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

What indication do you see that we will see a slow down in model capabilities or AI use?

Where did you exit to?

just cashout at the peak, hedge fund manager probably

This reads like a SoftBank slide deck.

Reading this makes me yearn for the ability to downvote comments