The reason why Nvidia is buying now does not have to do anything with Arc or GPU competition. There are mainly two reasons.
1) This year, Intel, TSMC, and Samsung announced their latest factories' yields. Intel was the earliest, with 18A, while Samsung was the most recent. TSMC yieled above 60%, Intel below 60%, and Samsung around 50% (but Samsung's tech is basically a generation ahead and technically more precise), and Samsung could improve their yields the most due to the way set up the processes, where 70% is the target. Until last year, Samsung was in the second place, and with the idea that Intel caught up so fast and taking Samsung's position at least for this year, Nvidia bought Intel's stock since it's been getting cheaper since COVID.
2) It's just generally good to diversify into your competitors. Every company does this, especially when the price is cheap.
I am curious where you get your information about Samsung being more “precise”.
I was recently looking into 2nm myself, and based on wikipedia article on 2nm, TSMC 2nm is about 50% more dense than the samsung and intel equivalent. They aren’t remotely the same thing. Samsung 2nm and Intel 18A are about as dense as TSMC 3nm, that’s been in production for years.
> I was recently looking into 2nm myself, and based on wikipedia article on 2nm, TSMC 2nm is about 50% more dense than the samsung and intel equivalent.
I did the math on TSMC N2 vs Intel 18A, and the former is 30% denser according to TSMC
1) This year, Intel, TSMC, and Samsung announced their latest factories' yields. Intel was the earliest, with 18A, while Samsung was the most recent. TSMC yieled above 60%, Intel below 60%, and Samsung around 50% (but Samsung's tech is basically a generation ahead and technically more precise), and Samsung could improve their yields the most due to the way set up the processes, where 70% is the target. Until last year, Samsung was in the second place, and with the idea that Intel caught up so fast and taking Samsung's position at least for this year, Nvidia bought Intel's stock since it's been getting cheaper since COVID.
2) It's just generally good to diversify into your competitors. Every company does this, especially when the price is cheap.