Comment by lvl155
6 hours ago
They probably know more than us. Such as alternative chips or that the Chinese will go in-house sooner than we think. Nvidia’s moat is not as permanent as people think.
6 hours ago
They probably know more than us. Such as alternative chips or that the Chinese will go in-house sooner than we think. Nvidia’s moat is not as permanent as people think.
> They probably know more than us. Such as alternative chips or that the Chinese will go in-house sooner than we think. Nvidia’s moat is not as permanent as people think.
This is Softbank though, they're not really noted for great investment decisions (apart from Alibaba really early on).
Like, my prior is that when Softbank invest in something, the growth is done (but then I am, very much, a cynic).
Softbank had 5% of Nvidia stock just before gen AI boom. Then they sold it when it was at its lowest. If they didn't it would have covered all their losses many times over with a profit of more than 200 billion dollars.
It's just baffling they are still getting billions to spend.
[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/softbank-sells-entire-nvidia-st...
Softbank has literally done this before. Several years ago, Softbank sold it's Nvidia stake and later regretted it to such an extent that Masayoshi Son expressed his feelings by crying. They're only selling Nvidia stock now to fulfill a prior giant cash commitment to OpenAI. Also, Nvidia is positioned to own a sizeable chunk of OpenAI.
Not to mention the US companies probably want to develop their own chips to get away from Nvidia too. I don’t really see why any company would want to base their entire business on the whims of nvidia.
Given how poorly Intel and AMD have fared, it suggests the hardware moat is much deeper than the software one.
Nvidia's moat is their pace of performance growth, which is hardware + software + cultural.
If they skip a beat, or it becomes impossible to increase performance (TSMC node stumble or P4-style dead-end), then it won't take long for someone to catch up.
If they keep executing on better hardware performance + software to support it? They keep the money spigot on.
People are saying that nvidia doesn't have any moat for 20 years. And nvidia hasn't been dethroned, but grown into the largest company in the world in the meantime.
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