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Ask HN: Why doesn't Nvidia hoard GPUs and create their own foundational model?

2 points by vincefutr23 ↗ HN
Is Nvidia's upside greater by hoarding their GPUs for themselves and developing the leading foundational model in house?

They are printing money selling shovels to goldminers, but any blacksmith could make a shovel if shovel co. stopped selling. Whereas if Nvidia stopped providing GPUs its far more difficult to source replacements, spelling doom for its customers.

OpenAI etc would have a far harder time finding or developing a new source of GPUs than Nvidia would have poaching ~50 researchers that could bring it to model performance parity.

With all the GPUs going forward, Nvidia would have the best model and be market dominant over Claude Chatgpt etc. Wouldn't a certain shot at being the "winner of AI" be a better outcome long term than being a highly compensated enabler?

6 comments

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icedshrimp
you forget that Nvidia is winning far more victories than any of the AI companies. they get to absorb all the benefits of the AI bubble with none of the risks
apothegm
For the same reason shovels were a better business than mining for gold.

The foundational model providers are hemorrhaging VC cash, with no certain path to profitability.

And for such a profitable business as Nvidia, the opportunity cost is massive. Any dollar burned trying to compete with them is a dollar Nvidia can’t invest in its cash cow business that’s currently generating whopping returns with little uncertainty.

al2o3cr
When they sell GPUs, they get money immediately which they can spend to make more GPUs

If they hoarded GPUs, they'd then need to figure out how to make "winning AI" produce money - which nobody has done yet. In the meantime, they'd need additional outside money to keep running operations.

They already face plenty of risk (eg long payoff times for capital investments in fabs etc), why would they take on more?

aurareturn
Because they are not better at OpenAI/Anthropic/Google at training foundational models and then building real products around those models.

Nvidia sucks at consumer software.

They do have Nemotron models that they release for free to the public but those are most likely done to dogfood their teams.

JohnFen
Selling the hardware is very profitable in the here and now. Making a new foundational model may not be (none of them are profitable so far). If I have the choice between making a lot of real money right now and gambling that I might make a lot of money later, I'll take the now.
drweevil
Nvidia is making a profit. Their AI customers are not.