$11,000 in 1997: Tench Coxe, the 3rd largest Nvidia shareholder who acquired these shares in 1997, just dumped $235 million worth of NVDA shares. /@Barchart/
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The 1st cloud running Nvidia’s Blackwell system with GB200-powered AI servers
@Azure: Microsoft Azure is the 1st cloud running @nvidia's Blackwell system with GB200-powered AI servers. We're optimizing at every layer to power the world's most advanced AI models, leveraging Infiniband networking and innovative closed loop liquid cooling. Learn more at MS Ignite.
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☑️ #149 Oct 3, 2024
The Big 3 of Cloud don’t really want to tell us what the ROI is for this AI infrastructure
@philoinvestor: So Microsoft, Amazon and Google (and Tesla too) are buying Chips from Nvidia —> and all together they invest in AI-related projects like Open AI (seeding them with billions) —> and Open AI then goes BACK to the Big 3 of Cloud to buy Compute from them to run all the Chatbots.
For 2024, Open AI sees $4 billion in losses, but it raises money from Big Tech to keep going and going.. We don’t really know if it will ever make money because Open AI isn’t the only AI company out there (mind you).
Meanwhile, this has created trillions in stock market value and trillions in capex spend.
—> And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
P.S. The Big 3 of Cloud don’t really want to tell us what the ROI is for this AI infrastructure. I assume they don’t want to tell us because there isn’t any, at least for now. Will there be later? We will see.
Coming on Philoinvestor
Downside at AI, a multi-part series on the AI thematic at large.
Image: AI-generated photo of “Bill Gates and Jensen Huang laughing”
@hedgevision: Nvidia is up by 4% after Jensen Huang completed his sale of six million shares worth over $700 million.
Huang pre-planned the sales using a 10b5-1 plan and completed the sales six months ahead of the March 2025 plan expiration.
The Huang selling overhang has been removed for now, although he could choose to adopt another selling plan if he wants.
Huang still owns 861.4 million shares worth a staggering $105 billion following the sale.
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☑️ #147 Sep 20, 2024
Alibaba Cloud Empowers Customers and Partners with its Proven Large Models and High-Performance Infrastructure
alibabacloud.com: [Excerpt] Global Cloud Leader Collaborates with NVIDIA, XPENG, miHoYo, Atlas, Codium, UNESCO-ICHEI to Drive the Future of Mobility, Gaming, Travel, IT and Education.
Driving the Future of Mobility and Smart Cockpits with LLMs Built on NVIDIA
Alibaba Cloud today unveiled its large multimodal model (LMM) solution designed for automotive applications and co-developed with NVIDIA and Banma, Alibaba’s intelligent cockpit solution provider. This solution, which will be made available to China-based automakers, aims to deliver a more interactive experience for car owners and redefine the smart mobility journey.
Through this collaboration, Alibaba Cloud’s portfolio of proprietary large language model Qwen—including the Qwen2-7B language model and the Qwen2-VL vision language model—have been seamlessly integrated with the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin™ platform for autonomous vehicles. Additionally, NVIDIA's model acceleration technology has significantly reduced computational costs and minimized latency in Alibaba Cloud models’ real-time processing of complex tasks. This ensures a smooth and uninterrupted intelligent experience for both drivers and passengers.
nvlm-project.github.io: [Excerpt] Today (September 17th, 2024), we introduce NVLM 1.0, a family of frontier-class multimodal large language models (LLMs) that achieve state-of-the-art results on vision-language tasks, rivaling the leading proprietary models (e.g., GPT-4o) and open-access models (e.g., Llama 3-V 405B and InternVL 2). Remarkably, NVLM 1.0 shows improved text-only performance over its LLM backbone after multimodal training. We are open-sourcing the model weights and code for the community.
Author: Wenliang Dai, Nayeon Lee, Boxin Wang, Zhuolin Yang, Zihan Liu, Jon Barker, Tuomas Rintamaki, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Wei Ping* Source: NVIDIA ADLR
@asymmetricinvesting: Jensen Huang Is Selling NVIDIA Stock At an Astonishing Rate.
NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang isn't just selling shares of the company he founded, he's selling 120,000 shares daily. In this video, Travis Hoium shows the astonishing pace at which Jensen Huang is selling NVIDIA stock and his history of sales.
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☑️ #144 Sep 13, 2024
Ken Griffin slashing his stake by 79%
@unusual_whales: Ken Griffin of Citadel Advisors sold 9.2 million shares of Nvidia, $NVDA, slashing his stake by 79%, per TMF.
🔹Related content:
fool.com: [Excerpt] Step Aside, Nvidia: Billionaires Are Selling It in Favor of 2 Other High-Growth Stock-Split Stocks. Billionaires continue to reduce their stakes in Wall Street's AI darling.
For three consecutive quarters, dating back to the start of October 2023, no fewer than seven billionaire money managers have reduced their respective stakes in Nvidia. The June-ended quarter featured seven billionaire sellers, including (total shares sold in parenthesis):
Readout of White House Roundtable on U.S. Leadership in AI Infrastructure
whitehouse.gov: [Excerpt] Today, as part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s comprehensive strategy for responsible innovation, the White House convened leaders from hyperscalers, artificial intelligence (AI) companies, datacenter operators, and utility companies to discuss steps to ensure the United States continues to lead the world in AI. Participants considered strategies to meet clean energy, permitting, and workforce requirements for developing large-scale AI datacenters and power infrastructure needed for advanced AI operations in the United States.
CNBCtelevision: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang: We are at the beginning of a new industrial revolution.
semafor.com (Update; 9/13/24): [Excerpt] How the UAE got the US to bless its AI ambition. The approval, which came earlier this year but has not been reported, is a major milestone for the ambitions of the UAE and the broader Gulf region. The area is becoming an increasingly important global technology hub — but Biden administration concerns about their ties to China have been obstacles to gaining access to key assets, like cutting-edge chips, which face US export curbs to the region.
Interested parties can listen to the live audio webcast of NVIDIA financial presentations at investor.nvidia.com. Webcast replays are available for 90 days afterward.
🔹Related content:
@CNBCtelevision: Nvidia CEO Huang defends price of servers. CNBC's Seema Mody joins 'Squawk on the Street' to share details from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's comments at Goldman Sachs' Communacopia conference.
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☑️ #141 Sep 5, 2024
Xockets Files Antitrust, Patent Infringement Lawsuit Against Nvidia
xockets.com (pdf): [Excerpt] Seeks Injunction to Halt These Activities And Financial Damages.
The lawsuit alleges that Nvidia and Microsoft have formed an illegal cartel, facilitated by an entity called RPX, to avoid paying the fair market price for Xockets’ patented DPU technology—fundamental intellectual property, or “IP,” that Nvidia uses to transform its GPUs into the drivers of the AI revolution and dominate the market for GPU-enabled AI computer systems. The filings allege that the buyers’ cartel at issue in this case is part of a pattern of illegal cartel behavior engaged in by Nvidia and Microsoft, as evidenced by the ongoing investigations of these entities by the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, and the European Union.
In the early 2010s, Dr. Dalal invents advanced Data Processing Units, or DPUs. His DPU inventions include new virtual switch computing and switching plane architectures for cloud offload of data intensive workloads to programmable logic pipelines of hardware accelerators in the network to enable accelerated computing and AI in cloud data centers
2012: Xockets files its first of many patent applications in May 2012, disclosing Xockets’ DPU virtual switch computing and switching plane architectures for cloud offload.
2014: Xockets starts to evangelize the cloud industry and investors to Xockets’ DPU architectures and builds a StreamSwitch as the commercial embodiment for going to market with its DPUs.
2015: Xockets demonstrates its StreamSwitch of DPUs to the industry at Strata, the premier conference for big data solutions and new networking products and technologies, showing extraordinary acceleration and costs savings for cloud data centers. Xockets enters into an exclusive license with SMART Modular for the manufacture of its StreamSwitch of DPUs and seeks to raise the capital to build a chip.
2016: In June 2016, NVIDIA’s Mellanox releases its ConnectX-5 SmartNIC that is now known to use Xockets’ DPU inventions, including by switching to a virtual switch computing architecture for deployment in Microsoft’s cloud for accelerated computing of cloud applications.
2020: NVIDIA acquires Mellanox for $7B for its ConnectX DPUs that use Xockets’ DPU inventions for the accelerated computing needed to transition Microsoft’s cloud to AI with NVIDIA’s GPU servers.
2021: NVIDIA releases its Bluefield DPUs as the next generation of Mellanox’s ConnectX DPUs that use Xockets’ DPU inventions, including its virtual switch computing architecture for accelerated computing and AI.
2022: NVIDIA implements Xockets’ switching plane architecture with its new NVLink Switch DPUs to form a new cloud fabric for accelerating the training of large language models like ChatGPT across its GPU-enabled server computer systems to drive forward the AI revolution using Xockets’ DPU inventions.
Pelosi dumped Nvidia (NVDA)? Fake news. There are no official reports of Nancy Pelosi selling or shorting NVDA in the past few days. @AsiaFinance tracked Pelosi's stock trades, net worth, portfolio, and other information, finding that her last trade on July 1 was a reduction of her stake in Visa (V). This was preceded by a reduction in Microsoft (MSFT) on June 26, but there was an increase in her holdings of NVIDIA (NVDA) and Broadcom (AVGO). In the U.S. capital markets, we trust only Grandma Pelosi while cautiously watching Grandpa Buffett.
bloomberg.com (9/4/24): [Excerpt] Nvidia Says It Has ‘Not Been Subpoenaed’ by the DOJ in Probe.
Bloomberg reported on the antitrust investigation Tuesday Nvidia says it has been in contact with the Justice Department.
Nvidia Corp., responding to a Bloomberg News report about the US Department of Justice sending out subpoenas as part of an antitrust probe, said it has been in contact with the government agency but hasn’t been subpoenaed.
The DOJ often sends requests for information in the form of what’s known as a civil investigative demand, which is commonly referred to as a subpoena. The Department of Justice has sent such a request seeking information about Nvidia’s acquisition of RunAI and aspects of its chip business, according to one person with direct knowledge of the matt
"We have inquired with the U.S. Department of Justice and have not been
subpoenaed. Nonetheless, we are happy to answer any questions regulators may have about our business,"
"wins on merit, as reflected in our benchmark results and value to customers, and customers can choose whatever solution is best for them."
@StockSavvyShay: The VP of AI at $NVDA has jumped ship to join rival $AMD in a similar role -- a HUGE talent grab for AMD
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☑️ #137 Sep 3, 2024 🔴 rumor
Nvidia received DOJ subpoena
@EdLudLow: BREAKING: NVDA 0.00%↑ Nvidia received DOJ subpoena (as did other parties) as the US Justice department seeks evidence that the chipmaker violated antitrust laws. This is an escalation of the departments investigation of Nvidia's dominance in AI computing. Reporting @leah_nylen and Ian King
@KobeissiLetter: BREAKING: Nvidia stock, $NVDA, has now erased $360 billion of market cap today including its after hours move. Including the after hours decline, this marks the largest single day loss of market cap for a stock in history. Large cap tech is struggling.
Right now NVIDIA has 76.83% probability of hitting 133.37
@Spreadcheat: its very hard to short nvda my backtest shows 22% winrate shorting and 82% winrate long.
right now nvdia has 76.83% probability of hitting 133.37 (+13.42%)
that's just may analysis but it's hard to go against my blackbox.
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☑️ #135 Aug 29, 2024
Nearly half of Nvidia’s revenue comes from just four mystery whales each buying $3 billion–plus
fortune.com: [Excerpt] CEO Jensen Huang claims his AI chip business is diversified, but his own company’s filings suggest just a few whales account for every second dollar in revenue.
That explains why profit after tax nearly quadrupled to $31.5 billion during this six-month period over the previous year. Whether revenue, and therefore earnings, can continue to grow at this blistering pace is crucial to its investment story.
Take “Customer B” cited in the filing, for example: Its direct purchases represented 11% of Nvidia’s $30 billion in revenue. That means a single company contributed more in business than the group’s second largest division—gaming, with $2.9 billion—did as a whole.
Customer B, however, remained below the 10% threshold for the entire first half, which suggests it significantly ramped up spending during the past quarter seemingly out of the blue. The exact same could be said about “Customer C”; the numbers provided by Nvidia are identical.
Non-discretionary funds will continue to buy NVDA simply based on its size
@t1alpha: Friendly reminder that non-discretionary funds will continue to buy $NVDA simply based on its size, regardless of its earnings or any other fundamental reasoning. For around ~50% of the investable market, fundamentals just aren't part of the algorithm.
🔹Related content:
@TrendSpider (update; 8/30/24): $NVDA received 12 analyst buy ratings today, with 11 of them increasing their price targets. The stock didn't seem to care one bit.
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☑️ #133 Aug 28, 2024
NVDA US’s Exposure to Related Companies
@Convertbond: If your third largest customer is committing fraud, is that bullish??? Nvidia $NVDA Super Micro Computer SMCI 0.00%↑
theregister.com (update; 8/29/24): [Excerpt] Nvidia admits Blackwell defect, but Jensen Huang pledges Q4 shipments as promised.
Even if Nvidia manages to ship Blackwell on time, the change could simply mean a later ramp and revenue realization than previously planned. Even still, Kress insisted that "Blackwell production ramp is scheduled to begin in the fourth quarter and continue into fiscal year '26," and that in Q4, the GPU giant will "ship several billion dollars in Blackwell revenue." Read more
sherwood.news: [Excerpt] Nvidia is the Bo Jackson of the stock market. 122% revenue growth and a 55% net profit margin. Almost as good as being named an All-Star in two different professional sports.
Nvidia’s latest results, for which expectations were understandably sky high, delivered the rarest of things: both outlandish sales growth and profit margins. This was broadly priced in, but it doesn’t change the fact that the fundamental numbers reported were remarkable for a company its size (or indeed, any size). In fact, in its latest quarter, the company notched revenue growth of 122%, with a net profit margin that, over the last 4 quarters, has clocked in at an impressive 55%.
Let’s try and give that result some context. One popular rule of thumb for venture capital investors, popularized by Brad Feld, is “The Rule of 40%” — that your revenue growth and profit margin should add up to 40%. So, if your company is growing at 30%, it should also be making at least a 10% profit margin. If you’re not growing at all, you need to at least be heavily profitable (40% margin). It’s a helpful heuristic to gauge whether a startup is on the right track, and the endless trade-off between growth and profitability.
So, how does Nvidia compare to its S&P 500 peers on that metric?
Unsurprisingly — even though the rule was designed for startups, not $3 trillion behemoths — it does very well: 122% + 55% = 177%.
☑️ #132 Aug 28, 2024
NVIDIA Blackwell Sets New Standard for Generative AI in MLPerf Inference Debut
blogs.nvidia.com: [Excerpt] First submission using the NVIDIA Blackwell GPU delivers up to 4x more performance on Llama 2 70B, and NVIDIA Hopper architecture powers large gains across industry AI benchmarks.
@KASDad: Four charts from Bloomberg's @johnauthers that reflect why $NVDA's post close Wednesday earnings are getting the attention that they are:
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☑️ #130 Aug 26, 2024
China’s AI Engineers Are Secretly Accessing Banned Nvidia Chips
wsj.com: [Excerpt] Brokers are making overseas computing power available and offering a high degree of anonymity.
A smart contract
In platforms used by Aw and others, the billing and payment methods are designed to give the participants a high degree of anonymity.
Buyers and sellers of computing power use a “smart contract” in which the terms are set in a publicly accessible digital record book. The parties to the contract are identified only by a series of letters and numbers and the buyer pays with cryptocurrency.
The process extends the anonymity of cryptocurrency to the contract itself, with both using the digital record-keeping technology known as blockchain. Aw said even he might not know the real identity of the buyer. As a further mask, he and others said Chinese AI companies often make transactions through subsidiaries in Singapore or elsewhere.
@techfund : Bloomberg has been trying AMD and Intel GPUs but is sticking with Nvidia for 95% of their workloads. Their H100 demand is not fulfilled, they are still trying to get the H100s they need. Expert available via Tegus.
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☑️ #127 Aug 13, 2024 🔴 rumor
Huawei Readies New Chip to Challenge Nvidia, Surmounting U.S. Sanctions
wsj.com: [Excerpt] Chinese tech company looks for AI business with Ascend series but still faces production issues.
China’s Huawei Technologies is close to introducing a new chip for artificial intelligence use, overcoming U.S. sanctions to challenge NvidiaNVDA -0.75% in the Chinese market.
Chinese internet companies and telecommunications operators have been testing Huawei’s latest processor, called Ascend 910C, in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the matter. Huawei told potential clients that the new chip is comparable to Nvidia’s H100, which was introduced last year and isn’t directly available in China, the people said.
nextplatform.com: [Excerpt] Huawei’s HiSilicon can compete with Nvidia GPUs in China.
WE HAVE SEEN THIS EXPORT CONTROL MOVIE BEFORE
Back in October 2010, when the Tianhe-1A supercomputer at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, China was revealed as the fastest floating point flopper in the world, it was created by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) and was comprised of 14,336 Intel Xeon processors and 7,168 of Nvidia’s Tesla M2050 GPU co-processors, with a whopping 4.7 petaflops of peak performance across all of those compute engines.
The Tianhe-2 kicker at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou was also a hybrid machine, but it was comprised of 16,000 Intel Xeon E5 processors and 16,000 “Knights Corner” Xeon Phi many-core accelerators. (Basically, a GPU-like accelerator with beefy vector engines attached to stripped-down X86 cores.)
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☑️ #126 Aug 5, 2024
Nvidia using Apple Vision Pro to control humanoid robots
NVIDIA builds three computers to enable the world’s leading robot manufacturers to build AI-enabled robots - NVIDIA AI and DGX to train foundation models, Omniverse to simulate and enhance AIs in a physically-based virtual environment, and Jetson Thor, a robot supercomputer. NVIDIA introduces new NVIDIA NIM microservices for robot simulation generative AI, accelerating humanoid robot developers.
A new teleoperation-simulation workflow enables humanoid robot developers to generate massive amounts of synthetic motion and perception data from a small number of recorded human demonstrations using NVIDIA Omniverse and NIM microservices.
linuxfoundation.org (8/1/23): [Excerpt] Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and NVIDIA Form Alliance for OpenUSD to Drive Open Standards for 3D Content.
SAN FRANCISCO – Aug. 1, 2023 – Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and NVIDIA, together with the Joint Development Foundation (JDF), a part of the Linux Foundation family, today announced the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) to promote the standardization, development, evolution, and growth of Pixar’s Universal Scene Description technology.
“Universal Scene Description was invented at Pixar and is the technological foundation of our state-of-the-art animation pipeline,”
“OpenUSD is based on years of research and application in Pixar filmmaking. We open-sourced the project in 2016, and the influence of OpenUSD now expands beyond film, visual effects, and animation and into other industries that increasingly rely on 3D data for media interchange. With the announcement of AOUSD, we signal the exciting next step: the continued evolution of OpenUSD as a technology and its position as an international standard.”
Steve May, Chief Technology Officer at Pixar and Chairperson of AOUSD.
Leaked Documents Show Nvidia Scraping ‘A Human Lifetime’ of Videos Per Day to Train AI
404media.co: [Excerpt] A former Nvidia employee, whom 404 Media granted anonymity to speak about internal Nvidia processes, said that employees were asked to scrape videos from Netflix, YouTube, and other sources to train an AI model for Nvidia’s Omniverse 3D world generator, self-driving car systems, and “digital human” products. The project, internally named Cosmos (but different from the company’s existing Cosmos deep learning product), has not yet been released to the public.
nvidia.com: AI and The Next Computing Platforms With Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg.
Monday, July 29 | 4:00–5:00 p.m. MT
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang and Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg will discuss how fundamental research is enabling AI breakthroughs, and how generative AI and open source will empower developers and creators. They’ll also discuss the role of generative AI in building virtual worlds, and virtual worlds for building the next wave of AI and robots.
Source: NVDIA Corporation
🔹Related content:
s2024.siggraph.org: [Excerpt] NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang and Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg will discuss how fundamental research is enabling AI breakthroughs, and how generative AI and open source will empower developers and creators. They’ll also discuss the role of generative AI in building virtual worlds, and virtual worlds for building the next wave of AI and robots.
About Huang and Zuckerberg
Jensen Huang founded NVIDIA in 1993 and has served since its inception as president, chief executive officer, and a member of the board of directors. Huang has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering and is a recipient of the Semiconductor Industry Association’s highest honor, the Robert N. Noyce Award; IEEE Founder’s Medal; the Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award; and honorary doctorate degrees from National Chiao Tung University, National Taiwan University, and Oregon State University. He has been named the world’s best CEO by The Economist and Harvard Business Review, as well as Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year and one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people. He holds a BSEE degree from Oregon State University and an MSEE degree from Stanford.
Mark Zuckerberg is the founder and CEO of Meta where he is responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for the company. He leads the design of Meta’s services and development of its core technology and infrastructure. Meta is working on building AGI and making it accessible and useful for everyone in the world, including by open sourcing its Llama models. Mark also co-founded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is leveraging AI to learn more about the behavior of our cells.
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☑️ #121 Jul 27, 2024
Cashing out much more frequently than normal
@TrendSpider: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has been cashing out much more frequently than normal this month...$NVDA
SK hynix designs to start construction of the 1st fab to be built in the Yongin cluster in March next year and complete it in May 2027, and have received an investment approval from the board of directors prior to it. The company will make every effort to build the fab to lay the foundation for the company’s future growth and respond to the rapidly increasing demand for AI memory semiconductors.
The Yongin Cluster, which will be built on a 4.15 million square meter site in Wonsam-myeon, Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, is currently under site preparation and infrastructure construction. SK hynix has decided to build four state-of-the-art fabs that will produce next-generation semiconductors, and a semiconductor cooperation complex with more than 50 small local companies.
SK Hynix Inc. and Nvidia's supplier announced on Friday that it will build a semiconductor factory in the Yongin Semiconductor Cluster.
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☑️ #119 Jul 21, 2024
Current Crowd Forecast: 19% chance
infer-pub.com (7/9/24): [Excerpt] Will Nvidia be the world’s most valuable company by market cap on 31 May 2025?
Current Rationale Summary: This is a summary of the arguments for and against the event in question ("On 31 May 2025, will Nvidia be the world’s most valuable company by market cap?") based upon the forecast rationales.
Arguments that the event will occur:
Nvidia has shown significant growth recently and briefly became the world's most valuable company, surpassing Microsoft and Apple. Analysts are optimistic about Nvidia's future growth potential in AI and chip sales, with some predicting it could reach a $6 trillion market cap by end of 2024. [134180]
Nvidia's revenue increased 2% from Q3 2023 to Q4 2023, potentially indicating more bullish movements in upcoming quarters. [134661]
The hype around AI is continuing to increase, which benefits Nvidia. Interest in AI will likely continue growing over the next couple years. [134132]
Arguments that the event will not occur:
Nvidia is dependent on sustained AI hype, but this hype cycle will likely fade within the next year unless hugely valuable AI applications emerge, which is unlikely. [134645]
Nvidia's market valuation seems like a bubble, and its high stock price could face substantial downward corrections. [134180]
Nvidia's market is too narrow compared to competitors like Microsoft and Apple that have more diversified offerings. [133892]
In summary, there are arguments on both sides as to whether the AI and chip hype driving Nvidia's growth is sustainable long enough for it to become and remain the world's most valuable company by next May.
Nvidia's stock plummeted, resulting in a loss of over $200 billion in market value.
The drop was part of a selloff in the chip and tech sectors.
Triggers for the decline included:
Comments from Donald Trump regarding Taiwan's defense
The Biden administration's potential new export restrictions to China
This volatility underscores the risks associated with Nvidia's recent rally.
Despite the drop, Nvidia's stock is still up nearly 150% year-to-date.
The selloff extended beyond Nvidia:
Other major tech stocks were affected
The "Magnificent Seven" lost about $500 billion in value collectively
This market movement may indicate a potential shift from big tech to smaller tech companies.
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☑️ #117 Jul 17, 2024 🔴 rumor
Google, Microsoft Help Chinese Firms Skirt Ban on Nvidia Chips
theinformation.com: [Excerpt] U.S. export controls forbid Chinese firms from buying Nvidia's advanced artificial intelligence chips. But companies in China can still gain access to some of those chips by renting Nvidia-powered servers at data centers outside China from Google, Microsoft and other global firms-underlining a gap in U.S. export rules.
Both Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure are offering to rent Nvidia's AI chips to Chinese companies, including Al startups, for use in data centers outside China. But apart from the biggest U.S. tech giants, there is a whole sector of smaller cloud providers specializing in offering access to Nvidia-powered servers around the world, and their services are available to Chinese customers. Some of these cloud providers are based in the U.S., but numerous others are based in Europe and Asia.
@hedgevision: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has sold $276 million worth of shares in 2024. Nvidia is screwed! Wait a second…
Huang still owns $113 billion of NVDA. In other words, his sales in 2024 have equated to 0.24% of his remaining stake.
Still, people are posting and freaking out every time he reports a new sale. It's not a big deal. Let the man celebrate.
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☑️ #115 Jul 8, 2024 🔴 rumor
Underground culture
@JChengWSJ: The Underground Network Sneaking Nvidia Chips Into China: An informal market circumvents U.S. export controls through supply-chain blind spots—and in one case, a student’s luggage
@JChengWSJ: A 26-year-old Chinese student in Singapore was packing suitcases last fall to return home for vacation. Besides his clothes and shoes, his luggage included six of Nvidia’s advanced artificial-intelligence chips.
⚡️
@JChengWSJ: A connection from college asked him to bring the chips because the U.S. restricted their export to China. Each chip was roughly the size of a Nintendo Switch game console, and the student didn’t flag any suspicions at the airport.
⚡️
@JChengWSJ: Upon arrival, the student was paid $100 for each chip he carried, a fraction of its worth. The student is part of a barely concealed network of buyers, sellers and couriers bypassing U.S. restrictions aimed at denying access to Nvidia’s advanced AI chips.
⚡️
@JChengWSJ: More than 70 distributors openly advertise online what they purport to be Nvidia’s restricted chips, and the Journal was in direct contact with 25 of them. Many of the verified sellers said supplies amounted to dozens of high-end Nvidia chips each month.
⚡️
@JChengWSJ: The flow of Nvidia chips is so steady that most of those sellers take preorders and promise delivery in weeks, the Journal found. Some also sold entire servers—costing upward of roughly $300,000—with each containing eight high-end Nvidia chips.
⚡️
@JChengWSJ: These merchants don’t sell enough of the powerful Nvidia processors to satiate a single tech giant’s demands. But for AI startups or research institutions with more modest needs, every Nvidia chip matters.
⚡️
@JChengWSJ: The sellers could be advertising Nvidia chips they don’t actually have or offering refurbished ones from older processors. But counterfeits would be nearly impossible to make in physical or performance terms, given the advanced nature of Nvidia products.
⚡️
@JChengWSJ: The Journal’s review includes verifying purchases with Chinese buyers who used the underground channels, as well as access to transaction records, customs filings and photos of the Nvidia chips up for sale.
⚡️
@JChengWSJ: Nvidia globally doesn’t sell its data-center chips individually. Instead, it ships them to third parties like Dell that deliver fully-built systems to those customers, who often order more Nvidia chips than they need, say industry participants.
⚡️
@JChengWSJ: The equipment providers’ visibility would also be limited if the end buyer chooses to route the servers—and the Nvidia chips inside them—to elsewhere, the participants added.
⚡️
@JChengWSJ: Enforcement of the U.S. export curbs on Nvidia chips largely rests with the Commerce Department and the companies themselves. Many foreign jurisdictions aren’t required to impose the U.S. controls.
⚡️
@JChengWSJ: The student transporting the Nvidia chips didn’t break any Singapore laws, lawyers say, since the components aren’t subject to local export restrictions. “Whether these transactions occur through distributors or intermediaries is very difficult to track.”
⚡️
@JChengWSJ: The scale of the informal market for Nvidia’s advanced chips is likely small compared with the overall market. Analysts at @CNASdc put the median number of AI chips smuggled annually at 12,500.
⚡️
@JChengWSJ: The chips the Chinese student carried came via a Singapore broker called “Brother Jiang” who is well known among chip distributors and buyers in Southeast Asia. In interviews with the WSJ, he said he taps contacts in the region to get chips and servers.
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☑️ #114 Jul 4, 2024 🔴 rumor
Nvidia to make $12bn from AI chips in China this year despite US controls
ft.com: [Excerpt] Chipmaker set to surpass China sales by local rival Huawei by selling product designed to fall outside of export restrictions.
The $3tn Silicon Valley group will over the coming months deliver more than 1mn of its new H20 chips, which are designed to fall outside of US restrictions on selling AI processors to Chinese customers, according to analyst forecasts.
That figure is almost twice as many as Huawei is expected to sell of its China-made rival product, Ascend 910B, according to estimates from SemiAnalysis, a chip consultancy.
@hedgevision : Cisco ex-CEO says Nvidia's dominance is different from dot-com bubble -WSJ
“The implications in terms of the size of the market opportunity (AI) is that of the internet and cloud computing combined. The speed of change is different, the size of the market is different, the stage when the most valuable company was reached is different," said former Cisco CEO John Chambers.
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☑️ #111 Jun 24, 2024
Insiders (2): more than $796 million this year
@Barchart: Nvidia $NVDA insiders have now cashed out for more than $796 million this year
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☑️ #110 Jun 23, 2024
Insiders (1): Jensen Huang’s largest cluster of sales in 19 years
@gurgavin: NVIDIA INSIDERS HAVE NOW SOLD MORE SHARES IN THE LAST 1 MONTH THAN EVER BEFORE
INSIDER BUYING V/S SELLING IN NVIDIA OVER THE LAST 1 MONTH
@jasongoepfpert (6/22/24): Jensen Huang just sold another $31 million of $NVDA. That brings his total sales this week to over $90 milli. It’s his largest cluster of sales in 19 years.
@jasongoepfert: I mean, it's probably something. $NVDAinsiders are dumping at the fastest pace in years. The other times it exceeded $150 million during a month, the stock got put in the penalty box
investor.gov (1/26/21): Updated Investor Bulletin: Insider Transactions and Forms 3, 4, and 5
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☑️ #109 Jun 20, 2024
A peak in Nvidia’s earnings growth may shift focus to suppliers
bloomberg.com: [Excerpt] Investors’ focus may shift to Nvidia Corp.’s supply chain in the semiconductor manufacturing sector should the US tech behemoth’s earnings explosion cool.
Analysis of Nvidia’s supply chain shows Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is the company’s biggest supplier, with the cost of goods sold share incurred by the US firm at a Bloomberg estimate of 35.8%. That’s followed by Wistron Corp. and SK Hynix Inc. Big suppliers have seen positive sales surprises. ASML Holding NV currently makes up 41% of TSMC’s equipment supply.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise and NVIDIA announce ‘NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE’ to accelerate generative AI industrial revolution
hpe.com: [Excerpt] New lineup features first-of-its-kind turnkey, private-cloud AI solution including sustainable accelerated computing with full Lifecycle services to streamline time to value with AI.
All NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE offerings and services will be available through a joint go-to-market strategy that spans sales teams and channel partners, training and a global network of system integrators — including Deloitte, HCLTech, Infosys, TCS and Wipro — that can help enterprises across a variety of industries run complex AI workloads.
Big Reshuffle of $71 Billion ETF Looms as Nvidia Surpasses Apple
bloomberg.com: [Excerpt] Chipmaker could get a fresh buying boost near the end of June. Diversification rules spur volatile changes in member weights.
For months, XLK has held way fewer Nvidia shares even as the AI giant soared 166% year-to-date. When the chipmaker ranked in third place, it made up roughly 6% of the ETF’s assets, compared with 22% in the S&P 500 Information Technology Index. The ownership cap, imposed under diversification rules, has caused XLK to underperform massively this year.
spectrum.ieee.org: [Excerpt] GPU maker tops new MLPerf benchmarks on graph neural nets and LLM fine-tuning
One system that included 11,616 Nvidia H100 GPUs—the largest collection yet—topped each of the nine benchmarks, setting records in five of them (including the two new benchmarks).
Training rounds in 2025 may see head-to-head contests comparing new accelerators from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia. AMD’s MI300 series was launched about six months ago, and a memory-boosted upgrade the MI325x is planned for the end of 2024, with the next generation MI350 slated for 2025. Intel says its Gaudi 3, generally available to computer makers later this year, will appear in MLPerf’s upcoming inferencing benchmarks. Intel executives have said the new chip has the capacity to beat H100 at training LLMs. But the victory may be short-lived, as Nvidia has unveiled a new architecture, Blackwell, which is planned for late this year.
@MLCommons: Congratulations @nvidia for your fantastic @MLCommons@MLPerf Training v4.0 results - Scaling to New Heights: NVIDIA MLPerf Training Results Showcase Unprecedented Performance and Elasticity
MLCommons: Thanks @HPCwire for sharing our MLPerf Training 4.0 results
Reminiscences of a Shrub Operator (aka Shrubstack): [Excerpt] The ETF has a Re-balance on June 21st and the cut-off date for establishing the new NUMBER TWO is June 14th.
Bloomberg estimates that should NDVA become the new Number Two, it would lead to $9.8bn of net buying for NVDA and $11.3bn of net selling for AAPL.
