alt Hacker NewsSuppose NVIDIA ceased to exist today. What would happen? AMD would step in. Huawei would step in. Maybe even Intel eventually. More fab capacity would go to these companies accelerators.
At worse, progress stalls for a year or two.
NVIDIA was at the lead and took most of the revenue and valuation because of it. But the same process would have happened with or without NVIDIA.
Now go back five years and substitute an NVIDIA collapse. Do you think that we'd be in a very different position for AI? I don't think it would be far off at all.
There were many game accelerator companies when NVIDIA started, they were just slightly better than the others, and the efficiency gains of consolidation resulted in those other companies being sold off.
ASML is definitely a one off though. And perhaps TSMC is a unique one off, but they got there by taking the most customers. If it wasn't them, then somebody else would have done it.
The key selection function was "this is the best option at the time" and if the best option hasn't existed, somebody else would have been chosen path that time, giving that other company the capital to build somethjng.
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> Suppose NVIDIA ceased to exist today.
(Notably, it kind of already has done so -- just in China rather than the US.)
In addition to all that, other investments would be made in other sectors. I'm sure a huge bulk of investment into NVDA in particular is strictly because of the five figure percentage growth it has enjoyed over the last 6 years after all, with the whole chip argument being the fig leaf over the rampant greedy pumping. It has exploded like some lucky shitcoin and that's enough to drive investor action on massive scale after all. We are in the world where shitcoins are listed along with the blue chip tickers on bloomberg news. Everyone is greedy right now. Gambling on every scale from every direction. Most corrupt president in history to boot openly insider trading; water is full of chum and blood right now.
We don't need to do all this hypothetical thinking. Jensen's vision for his company is what positioned his company to gain from AI.
Say whatever you want about those other companies: they exist right now and there is nothing stopping them from competing.
Who has the GPUs everyone wants today, and why do you think that is? Why do you need to bring in all the hypothetical thoughts?
ASML and TSMC are not one offs. When the investment cost to compete becomes so great: talent must centralize to push the frontier.
You could build exact mirror images of the factories and you will struggle to find the talent to run the factory.