A common hypothesis for why Nvidia is so hot is because they have an effective monopoly on the hardware to train AI models and it requires a crap ton of hardware.
With DeepSeek it’s been demonstrated you can get pretty damn for a lot cheaper. I can only imagine that there are tons of investors thinking that it’s better to invest their dollars in undercutting the costs of new models vs investing billions in hardware.
The question is, can Nvidia maintain their grip on the market in the face of these pressures. If you think they can’t, then a short position doesn’t seem like that big of a gamble.
it’s effectively a software moat wrt. GPU programming, there’s nothing stopping AMD from catching up besides insufficiently deep pockets and engineering culture
Not sure why AMD’s software side gets so much flack these days. For everything other than AI programming, their drivers range from fine to best in class.
I have an AMD minipc running linux that I use for steam gaming, light development, etc. The kernel taint bit is off.
There is one intel device on the pci/usb buses: wifi/bt, and it’s the only thing with a flaky driver in the system. People have been complaining about my exact issue for something like 10 years, across multiple product generations.
Nobody who controls the purse strings cares about the kernel taint bit if their model doesn’t train, if they’re burning developer time debugging drivers, if they have to burn even more dev time switching off of cuda, etc.
If AMD really cared about making money, they would’ve sent MI300s to all of the top CS research institutions for free and supported rocm on every single product. Investing any less than nvidia, the trillion dollar behemoth, is just letting big green expand their moat even more.
As I said, other than AI. The management made a big bet on crypto when nvidia made a big bet on AI.
That didn’t work out all that well in the medium term (it did in the short term), though it gave them runway to take a big chunk of intel’s server market.
Whether or not that was a good move, it’s not evidence of some engineering shortcoming.
With DeepSeek it’s been demonstrated you can get pretty damn for a lot cheaper. I can only imagine that there are tons of investors thinking that it’s better to invest their dollars in undercutting the costs of new models vs investing billions in hardware.
The question is, can Nvidia maintain their grip on the market in the face of these pressures. If you think they can’t, then a short position doesn’t seem like that big of a gamble.