Nvidia deliberately kept GPU prices high through circular financing deals (techspot.com)
36 points by madihaa an hour ago
stephc_int13 10 minutes ago
Jensen Huang made mistakes that gave opportunities to his enemies. But the bigger mistake was his incredible greed, he should have been a happy supplier of an extremely valuable product, and accept competition and that his quasi-monopoly was only transient. But he wanted the entire cake for himself.
Greed and hubris. I think the turbulences will be painful to some, especially those who counted on Nvidia stock to finance their retirement.
But, big picture, this is good news.
intothemild 8 minutes ago
Looks like this claim was coming from Ed Zitron
https://respawnfirst.com/multiple-reports-say-nvidia-manufac...
lukeify 27 minutes ago
Nvidia should be broken up.
doitLP 8 minutes ago
Into what exactly? They have a single product that makes them money.
cremp 9 minutes ago
Especially with the buyout of SchedMD, who support Slurm for these large HPC clusters doing the AI training.
randypewick 24 minutes ago
I love to see when capitalism works great and free market is efficient.
233mhz 33 minutes ago
The invisible hand of the free market ;)
CamperBob2 27 minutes ago
The free market where every innovation is locked up for 20 years behind patent walls? That free market?
readthenotes1 7 minutes ago
People forget just how unfree free markets are.
Of course, free markets tend to become unfree without regulation they are a bit of a unicorn.
goodmythical 19 minutes ago
The free market that chose of it's own volition to allow participants to either optionally utilize copyright or not?
butterisgood 37 minutes ago
As if we didn’t suspect this. Same with RAM makers not upping production.
It’s like the oil companies whining and fleecing us too.
What’s the move though?
lukeify 26 minutes ago
Remember when Microsoft got in years of antitrust lawsuits over bundling a browser with their OS? Bring back that level of legal scrutiny to antitrust, and sever the absurdly close ties the US government has with the top 100 companies in the country.
lvl256 25 minutes ago
Ram makers are more understandable since they went through this already in the past. The Koreans learned it the hard way.
reenorap 28 minutes ago
People are acting like vendors extending financing to their customers is somehow irregular or illegal.
It’s not. It happens ALL THE TIME. This isn’t “circular financing” which is a great meme term but is not factual.
smallerize an hour ago
I don't have a WSJ subscription, but was there actually anything weird about the deals? I mean it seems pretty normal.
beloch 11 minutes ago
"Nvidia was in talks to provide billions of dollars of guarantees to companies that couldn’t afford its chips. That included deals led by Huang’s son-in-law, Nico Caprez, who had been offering upstart cloud providers and data-center developers financing in the hopes of turning them into long-term customers."
...
"Amid the rollout of the program, Kress raised questions including how to decide which deals to pursue, how to value the guarantees, and how to calculate the return on investment, a person familiar with the matter said. Behind the scenes, she tried to rein in Huang’s son-in-law, who had been promoted to a vice president in January, people who worked with her said."
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It sounds like there may have been a little bit of Nepotism. This article also suggests that Huang himself was uncomfortable with the deals Nvidia and the data centres it had invested in were making, although he appeared to shift blame onto those running the data-centres.
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"In Berlin during a conference, Huang, accompanied by his top sales executives, broadcast a new message to a half-dozen CEOs of companies that are major buyers of Nvidia chips who were seated around a circular table. He opened with a story that sounded like a fable, according to people who attended.
Huang had once found a soup vendor in Japan, he said, with a long line of customers. He joined the line, and after a long wait, enjoyed one of the best bowls of soup he’d ever had. When he asked for another serving, the soup-seller told him no—he had too many customers waiting and not enough soup for all of them.
“He’s a better businessperson than all of you,” Huang told the cloud computing CEOs. The soup-man doesn’t sell out all his inventory to one or two customers, but instead keeps prices high and his customer base diverse, the CEO said.
“You are not establishing the value of my products,” he said."
233mhz 31 minutes ago
It can be normal, legal and still morally bankrupt. Fuck these parasites
roosterIllusi0n 31 minutes ago
Forcing your customers to buy additional hardware they don't need to inflate the prices of your own product is a crime in the united states of america.
It get worse when we find out they did it to increase nvidia production for the purpose of being able to redirect more output to china.
The whole entire AI bubble was actually jensen's smuggling operation to china. These large data centers have no purpose and cost more money in power grid upgrades than any company will ever make operating them.
The only winners look to be jensen's bank account, the bank accounts of the CEOs that signed the deals to buy unneeded hardware, and the chinese buisnesses that were able to buy more nvidia graphics cards.
It is not a crime for these CEOs to drive their companies into the ground to make themselves richer. Most CEOs do this today. It is a crime if we find out all of this was really a chinese smuggling operation and that would make it the largest crime per monetary value in US history.
Everyone who made money on this smuggling ring has criminal liability. Just like with madoff, the people who withdrew gains had to pay it back because the gains weren't real. Not paying it back would make you an accomplice.
smallerize 15 minutes ago
Forcing your customers to buy additional hardware
Ok that sounds interesting and it's not in this article. Where can I learn about that?