Submitted 2 months ago by themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com to technology@lemmy.world
You can do everything right and still have the curse of investor overconfidence placed on you.
Huang has been complaining for some time that doing well doesn’t result in stock gains, but the actual problem is the stock price is way too high so doing well does nothing for investor expectations.
This is when you sell shares because they no longer have any upside potential.
It sucks for companies though, but the fact is nvidia is overvalued at a 4.5T market cap.
In some ways the victim of their own success, that’s just the way this system is built, for better or worse (mostly worse). The incentives drive the behaviour, but the architecture is hostile in nature, so it’s hard to have different outcomes at a certain level. Infinite growth is literal cancer.
“We didn’t want to inflate our valuation with circular investings, the market made us do it! We are the victims here!!”
*Deploys golden parachute*
he’s got nothing to worry about. when they crash down to $1, trump will call it a “matter of national security” or some shit, and then bail them out, courtesy of your tax dollars and my tax dollars. because they actually want the AIs for their police state surveillance
The company doesn’t care if the stock price hits $1. If the company is paying it’s bills, it just continues. It’s the people who hold shares that care. The company doesn’t hold shares in itself.
Enron collapsed because the company financials collapsed, not because the stock price collapsed. That happened after all the bad accounting practises and hidden debt came to light. Now, in that case the shareholders succeeded in suing for their losses, but they only had a case because of the mismanagement.
You can’t really bail out a stock price though…
I guess you could provide a guaranteed backstop to sellers and funnel the stock to the government, as Trump seems to love doing, but then you end up with a $3T of over-valued assets that you can’t do anything with.
Nvidia definitely isn’t Enron. It’s all of Nvidia’s customers that are mini-Enrons.
Enron crashed because they were cooking their books and faking income, declaring potential profit where none existed.
That’s not Nvidia. Nvidia is selling actual product as fast as they can make it at whatever price they want to charge.
Nvidia’s customers, on the other hand, are the ones who have to justify buying millions of dollars of product from Nvidia and explaining how they plan to make a profit from that.
Enron crashed because they were cooking their books and faking income, declaring potential profit where none existed
Sell chips to X
Receive stock in X
Value of stocks = discounted sum of future (fake) income
Booked as an asset on the balance sheet
This is exactly like Enron but the underlying commodity isn’t energy, it’s compute.
Nvidia sells plenty of GPUs for actual money, they are good for it.
No, the real issue is the depreciation for the people owning GPUs. Your GPU will be usable for 4-6 years, and 2-4 of those years will be spent as ”the cheap old GPU. After that time, you need new GPUs. (And as the models are larger by then, you need moahr GPU)
How the actual fuck do these people expect to get any ROI on that scale with those timeframes? With training, maybe the trained model can be an asset (lol), but for inference there are basically no residual benefits.
And the companies faking revenue instead of profit.
NVIDIA is producing and delivering GPUs. However this does NOT translate into income, and that’s what’s making it shady. These companies are paying in shares that will be worth nothing when it pops.
It depends on the customer. Microsoft, Google, Amazon all have the revenue to carry the debts they are taking on. Oracle, Chat GPT, Musk and others are waay more sketchy.
The build out is going to take billions of dollars and these companies aren’t going to see a return for at least 5 years or more. The majors can carry that kind of debt load long term even if AI doesn’t pan out. Other businesses will struggle or go under if AI doesn’t bring the returns.
The next major movers will be companies that do a lot of IT business consulting like IBM. They are going to be busy helping non IT focused firms incorporate AI into their business model.
Finally if all these data centers pan out and the US keeps oscillating between shunning Renewables or Fossil fuels every time a new party comes to office we are going to have major problems with our energy infrastructure. Think energy bills as high as your mortgage within the next 5 years. Invest in utilities or energy companies and try to put solar and some kind of storage on your home.
It’s all of Nvidia’s customers that are mini-Enrons.
I donlt think that those are faking profit. Well, I donlt have some comprehensive list, but not for the majority of purchases. Like, it’s possible that they won’t wind up being long-term profitable, but there isn’t fraud involved in that.
OPENAI is probably the one that will be set to lose the most, and then oracle? i dont know if palintir fits into this, but THEIls company have been desperately trying to peddle his services to multiple countries already.
Enron was cooking the books hiding huge deficits, and spending the money from the workers pension funds, so no Nvidia isn’t Enron, but that doesn’t mean it’s great.
Joke aside, that’s kind of the vibe it gives off.
The pension was already stolen before it had a chance to exist.
Especially since they made the comparison on their own! Relevant article: wheresyoured.at/nvidia-isnt-enron-so-what-is-it/
If a company says they are not like Enron, it means they 1000% are exactly like Enron
Yeah. Enron’s scheme was trading money back and forth with itself to inflate its value until it all came crashing down, tanking Enron.
Nvidia is at the center of a scheme involving the entire economy trading money back and forth between a few companies to inflate value, so when the scheme tanks it’ll crush everybody.
Big tech is just trading the same $100b between each other to generate infinite shareholder value.
Man that reminds me of an old comic where two guys give each other the same $50,000 back and forth to eat horse shit and in the end their like, “we just created two jobs and grew GDP by $100,000!” Lol
In Russia it’s an anecdote about two cowboys with one saying in the end “Bill, I think we’ve both just eaten shit for free”.
hot potatoes, but they do need someone to hold on to that 100bn debt, usually other industries outside the tech sector. thats why they peddle it so hard to trump, to be used with palintir, and then other services.
Remember that when the news article talks about the economy, it’s mostly talking about rich people’s yachts.
Obviously there are some people nearing retirement age who need their pension plans not to lose value rapidly, they do exist. But the vast majority of the money that is being discussed here, that a bubble might make or break, is millionaires and billionaires savings accounts… So when this bubble bursts and when these companies go bankrupt, to hell with the ultra rich. If we want to help out people who are struggling to live out their retirement because of the stock market collapse that will occur, let’s do that, and let’s just tell the billionaires to go to hell.
A second order Enron you say?
Enron 2.0, bigger, faster, better.
ENRON reimagined series, more likely
They are going to do a lot more damage then Enron when their bubble pops.
What if it’s not a bubble?
So I tried using some AI chatbots to find a movie recently, it made up a few, none being the answer.
(The question was about a historical movie, made in perhaps 1970s by the feeling, set someplace in southern France somewhere around 1650s, has a few beautiful views of nature and castles ; one scene where a guard captain enters a room, asks a question, as a power gesture drinks a glass of wine on the table and a minute later falls ; another scene where for whatever reason a rapier fight happens in something like a tavern, two women in pastel dresses are descending by an open ladder from the second floor, seeing the brawl take our pocket pistols, one of them is stabbed with a rapier ; another scene where a guy is getting question with his feet over the fire ; another when another guy is climbing a tower clinging at brick mortars outside and hears guards’ boots on the ladder very loudly ; when I was a kid and saw that, someone said it’s an adaptation of something by Lope de Vega, but I’m not sure that’s correct ; that’s just in case someone reading this knows such a movie.)
But some googling sessions they do optimize, without you the user ever having to browse a webpage, and just getting a textual answer. That’s a valid use.
And some other processes. They don’t have to be useful for all things they are applied to, just some profitable.
Being a bubble does not mean the service they provide is useless. It means that the service is never generating enough profit to repay for the huge cost of providing it.
Would you pay 500 dollars a month to have the possibility to do your movie searches? Or alternatively, would you like your LLM of choice to counter that, having read all your emails and browser history, you are probably interested in a totally different movie that just happens to be playing now at a nearby cinema?
Because these AI companies are currently burning through literally a good chunk of all the cash in the world and they will eventually need to make even more gigantic profits to repay that cash. And the only one that is currently making money from AI seems to be NVIDIA, by selling the hardware that powers the AI giants.
I’m not saying that it IS all a bubble, by the way, as I can’t read the future and these gigantic profits might well materialize in the future. I’m just saying that “bubble” and “useless” are different.
OpenAI is more like Enron that NVidia I would assume.
Nvidia is Cisco in this analogy
Me: Come on, pop already. There are funds betting on AI bubble burst, ready for me to invest in.
If you want to get advantage from a speculative fund making a bet on a popped bubble, then you need to be already invested now, before the bubble bursts. (And also, you/your fund need to be right that it’s really about to pop now, and not later)
Once the race is over it’s too late to bet on the ponies.
Narrator: it was Enron
Nvidia is just selling overpriced premium shovels in a gold rush. They don’t care if there’s gold there or not.
Enron went bust by hiding debts. Making a loss is one thing, but lying about it to shareholders (and getting found out) is a one way trip out of the stock exchange.
Regurgitating Zitron with kid gloves.
LinkedIn perverts could write long screeds about AI…
Lmao
The SP500 is starting to look like NVIDIA -> companies NVIDIA is investing in -> everyone else. Its starting to get NVIDIA heavy. If they go down…SP500 is gong to look terrible.
It’s a bad position to be in. If they crash it will be bad, but if they keep growing and then crash it could be worse.
Perfect place to be in to get a bailout. Nothing better than to pump it to the max and try and make it some one else’s problem
America is about to learn the lesson Nortel taught Canada.
This guy will sell your soul. I don’t trust a word he says.
“We are not Enron, damn it! They were an energy company, we make computer parts!”
Wall Street is Enron now. It’s a house of cards
If you have to protest the insinuation as the CEO of a company in a public forum…Then I think the accusation has already found enough root to at least contain more than a grain of truth. The phrase “He doth protest too much” comes to mind.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
They’re right in the sense that it isn’t Enron; they’re gonna make it way worse.
My “We’re totally different from Enron” accounting report has a lot of investors asking questions answered by the report.
Nvidia has aggressively rebutted suggestions of any similarity [to failed telecom Lucent], saying in a leaked recent memo that it “does not rely on vendor financing arrangements to grow revenue”.
…Saying in a memo that was suspiciously, conveniently leaked and just so happens to claim everything is fine
Well, “Thou shalt not create a machine to counterfeit the human mind” was pretty clear in the 1960s but what do I know?
NVIDIA isn’t Enron but they definitely are Cisco.
NVIDIA is not Enron but they will definitely loose a great deal when the AI bubble pops.
LOSE
No idea if that was autocorrect or stupidity.
Never trust someone who wears a leather jacket.
Who’s seeing this person with positive vibes?
I would say, “never trust a CEO who wears a leather jacket.”
I’ve know plenty of bikers, punks, artists, etc that wear a leather jacket. But, a CEO in one stinks of, “hello there, fellow plebs.”
I would say never trust a CEO
I’m curious. Economically speaking, what would happen if Nvidia pulled a “Steam” and had a “February sale” where some models of video card were discounted enough to lead to a massive spike in sales numbers? A big enough discount to generate a greater total net return on sales for the quarter despite the fact that they were sold at a lower profit margin per individual sale? Assuming limitations like “you must create an account with a residential shipping address that can receive no more than x cards at the discounted price per street address” or some such to limit scalping, would simply showing increased profits do them any good?
Or is the problem due to a lack of product quantity?
Steam can do massive numbers spikes because they have essentially infinite inventory. The whole reason scalping video cards works is that Nvidia can not make as many as people want, even at full retail price. The existence of scalpers implies that Nvidia could raise prices, sell slightly fewer units at higher margin and get greater total return.
Which is why their latest generation of cards costs almost a thousand dollars or more.
This is more MCI Worldcom than Enron.
MushuChupacabra@lemmy.world 2 months ago
That’s such an Enron thing to say.
a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I bet Enron also claimed it wasn’t Enron.
RelativeArea1@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
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Wooki@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The irony that nVidia just shifted the narrative from “not enough chips” to “not enough energy” is insane.