Nvidia and OpenAI abandon unfinished $100B deal in favour of $30B investment

https://www.ft.com/content/dea24046-0a73-40b2-8246-5ac7b7a54323

303 312 5 months ago

marcyb5st4• 5 months ago

Oracle debt holders are sweating profusely right now I imagine. How does OpenAI gets 300B$ to pay Oracle [1] when nVidia has to be convinced to shell out "just" 30B for actually purchasing nVidia hardware.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/90aa74a5-b39d-4131-a138-367726cb1...

lm284694• 5 months ago

How does OpenAI gets 300B$ to pay Oracle

Easy, they just have to sell their overpriced vram chips (which haven't been manufactured yet), from their GPUs (which haven't been bought yet) which are in their data centers (the ones they're planning to build "soon"). It really isn't rocket science

__patchbit__• 5 months ago

Reallocate the $70 billion split difference to orbital station AI datacenters and Moon mass driver launched life cycle renewal equipment resupplies.

hshdhdhj4444• 5 months ago

Or as OpenAI has been trial ballooning for months, the government bails them out.

pawelduda• 5 months ago

Maybe they could sell the RAM reserves they've been hoarding

throwaway858253• 5 months ago

OpenAI is the HBM market.

this_user• 5 months ago

I am very curios if OpenAI's IPO attempt this year will turn into WeWork 2.0 where all the air suddenly comes out of the valuation once the market acknowledges that they have no moat and lack a clear path to profitability that would make these huge investments worthwhile.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 5 months ago

There are at least plausible scenarios where OpenAI is a VERY valuable company in the near future.

There were not with WeWork.

The SpaceX/xAI IPO will be more interesting.

SecretDreams5• 5 months ago

All of these things are vastly overvalued. Only one with tangible value is SpaceX because that's actually a moat-space. OAI holds no moat, has not done a good enough job to entrap their users, and has poor cost structure.

xAi isn't even a point of discussion.. it's just a scheme to rip off investors.

WeWork.. hard to take anyone seriously that ever invested in this bad boy.

paxys3• 5 months ago

There’s a reason OpenAI and Anthropic are both trying to accelerate their IPO while still being wildly unprofitable. There is still unlimited AI hype in the market. If they go public this year the entire world is going to blindly buy them without looking at their books.

burnte7• 5 months ago

There is still unlimited AI hype in the market.

I've observed a very different state. From what I've seen the sky-high expectations of AI have come down quite a lot.

zerosizedweasle3• 5 months ago

https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai... I hope so

jcgrillo• 5 months ago

I'm super curious to see if Nvidia turns out to be Enron 2.0..

quantified2• 5 months ago

They would need to have massive accounting fraud and lose public support. Unlike Enron, Nvidia actually sells tangible goods at a massive profit, and hasn't appeared to gloat over people getting screwed over.

chasd0011• 5 months ago

i think worst case they go back to selling GPUs to gamers. That would indeed be a massive front page story and movies would be made about it but I don't think the fraud is there. They have a pretty straightforward business, make GPU cards and sell them.

tim3332• 5 months ago

Nah, not Enron. Maybe Cisco.

Herring• 5 months ago

A recognizable trusted brand is a moat, look it up. OpenAI has that in spades.

october8140• 5 months ago

This thing is about to pop.

lm284694• 5 months ago

You know it's bad when even scam altman calls for regulations. They spend their entire lives telling you regulations are bad and taxation is theft but as soon as they need to drown the competition they lobby for more regulations

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/openai-chief-sam-altman-...

mnky9800n2• 5 months ago

Rules for thee not for meeeeeee

villgax• 5 months ago

Altman has been calling for it since 2023, lobbying world leaders meeting them to push on this Lol, were you under a rock or something?

Capricorn2481• 5 months ago

But he's been doing that for years too.

raincole• 5 months ago

This comment cannot be further from reality. Altman has always been a very loud advocate for AI regulation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/technology/openai-altman-...

freetonik• 5 months ago

Using words like “Scam Altman” instantly reduces credibility of the author in my eyes. If you want to convince people of something, perhaps it’s better not to use childish methods.

No disrespect, just sharing my thoughts. I see “Elmo Musk” and “Orange Man” etc., and I immediately think this is not worth reading (regardless of my opinion of those persons).

criddell4• 5 months ago

Have you moved your retirement account money out of stocks and index funds into something safer? I've actually been thinking about it...

marcyb5st4• 5 months ago

I did. I moved to sovereign debt (not US), bonds and stocks of boring companies (staples, energy, medicine, ...) that have at least AA rating. Might miss out a few months of glamorous growth, but fuck that, it reached a point that just one company hiccuping will send the whole thing tumbling (IMHO).

hypeatei2• 5 months ago

Valuations really aren't that crazy, but the incestuous deals between Nvidia, Oracle, and OpenAI might cause a decent correction. I'm not too worried about my portfolio personally. It'll be a small bump in the road and you're better off not trying to time the market.

baggachipz4• 5 months ago

Yes. Went from 100% S&P500 fund into a gold ETF and a high-dividend fund (SCHD). Still a good portion in S&P but gotta hedge some.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 5 months ago

No for a few reasons. I'm not close to retiring, I already own a good deal of bonds, and moving money based on emotion defeats the purpose.

I rebalanced the same as I always have.

kronks• 5 months ago

To anyone reading, don’t do this.

This is the ONE thing you aren’t supposed to do as a passive investor. A play like this will cause you to lose upside almost always, and some people never get back in and miss out on almost a lifetime of growth.

THE MARKETS ARE NOT RATIONAL.

toomuchtodo3• 5 months ago

Enough VXUS to minimize the impact of Mag 7 exuberance on my portfolio.

moduspol• 5 months ago

Yep. And I've already moved it back. I think we can all see this is a bubble, but it has been for over a year now, and I cannot predict when it will pop.

Also, there aren't a ton of great options that are safer.

unethical_ban2• 5 months ago

I thought about it. The bulk of my 401k money is in a growth fund that i found has something like 30% in the big tech companies.

Then again, I'm 20+ years from accessing it, so I figure I'm about 5 years out from moving more to S&P tracking and bonds. I am not a financial advisor.

throwfaraway4• 5 months ago

The Market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

astrange2• 5 months ago

That's a terrible idea. Never ever do that. Never even think about what's in your retirement account unless you are actually about to retire.

infecto3• 5 months ago

When retail is predicting a pop it’s time to buy.

malfist2• 5 months ago

When my friend told me not to put my hand in the fire, I knew it was time to stick it in and not pull it out, no matter what it cost me.

paxys3• 5 months ago

I've been hearing "the bubble is about to burst" every day since 2011. Yeah there will be an eventual correction, maybe in a major way, but trying to time the market is and always will be a fool's errand. The rock bottom of the next hype cycle can be higher than the peak of the current one.

raydev• 5 months ago

Hopefully I'll soon be able to build a new high end gaming PC and not be forced to pay 1980s era prices for it.

SirensOfTitan2• 5 months ago

Regardless of the promise of the underlying technology, I do wonder about the long-term viability of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Not only are they quite beholden to companies like Nvidia or Google for hardware, but LLM tech as it stands right now will turn into a commodity.

It's why Amodei has spoken in favor of stricter export controls and Altman has pushed for regulation. They have no moat.

I'm thankful for the various open-weighted Chinese models out there. They've kept good pace with flagship models, and they're integral to avoiding a future where 1-2 companies own the future of knowledge labor. America's obsession with the shareholder in lieu of any other social consideration is ugly.

chasd0011• 5 months ago

I think google ends up the winner. They can keep chugging along and just wait for everyone else to go bankrupt. I guess apple sees it too since the signed with google and not OpenAI.

piker• 5 months ago

And what about Microsoft?

napolux2• 5 months ago

downvote all you want. google has all the money to keep up and just wait for the others to die. apple is a different story, btw, can probably buy openai or anthropic, but for now they're just waiting like google, and since they need to provide users AI after the failure with Apple Intelligence, they prefer to pay for Google and wait for the others to fight against each other.

openai and anthropic know already what will happen if they go public :)

sethops12• 5 months ago

This is the conclusion I came to as well. Either make your own hardware, or drown paying premiums until you run out of money. For a while I was hopeful for some competition from AMD but that never panned out.

m-schuetz3• 5 months ago

Also Gemini works absolutely fantastic right now. I find it provides better results for coding tasks compared to ChatGPT

Aboutplants• 5 months ago

The minute Apple chose Google, OpenAI became a dead duck. It will float for a while but it cannot compete with the likes of Google, their unlimited pockets and better yet their access to data

neya4• 5 months ago

Google is the new Open AI. Open AI is the new Google. Guess who wants to shove advertisements into paying customers' face and take a % of their revenues for using their models to build products? Not Google.

hansmayer2• 5 months ago

It is a rather attractive view, and I used to hold it too. However, seeing as Alphabet recently issued 100-year bonds to finance the AI CapEx bloat, means they are not that far off from the rest of the AI "YOLO"s currently jumping off the cliff ...

butlike• 5 months ago

In addition to that, Google and Apple are demonstrated business partners. Google has consistently paid Apple billions to be the default search engine, so they have demonstrated they pay on time and are a known quantity. Imagine if OpenAI evaporated and Siri was left without a backend. It'd be too risky.

alex1138• 5 months ago

Now if only Google could a) drop its commitment to censorship and b) stop prioritizing Youtube links in its answers

xnx2• 5 months ago

In a few years this will amazingly alway have been obvious to everyone.

duped• 5 months ago

Google has proven themselves to be incapable of monetizing anything besides ads. One should be deeply skeptical of their ability to bring consumer software to market, and keep it there.

techpression• 5 months ago

How is censorship / ”alternative information” affecting them? Genuinely curious as I’ve only read briefly about it and it was ages ago.

whynotmaybe• 5 months ago

I've tried deepseek a few months ago and asket about the Tiananmen square protests and massacre.

At first the answer was "I can't say anything that might hurt people" but with a little persuasion it went further.

The answer wasn't the current official answer but way more nuanced that Wikipedia's article. More in the vein of "we don't know for sure", "different versions", "external propaganda", "some officials have lied and been arrested since"

In the end, when I asked whether I should trust the government or ask for multiple source, it strongly suggested to use multiple sources to form an opinion.

= not as censored as I expected.

delaminator• 5 months ago

Anthropic is also using lots of Amazon hardware for inference.

jpalomaki• 5 months ago

Both Anthropic and OpenAI are working hard to move away from being "just" the LLM provider on the background.

ulfbert_inc• 5 months ago

LLM tech as it stands right now will turn into a commodity

I am yet to see in-depth analysis that supports this claim

otabdeveloper4• 5 months ago

It's already a commodity. The strongest use case is self-hosted pornography generation.

wejwej• 5 months ago

To take the other side of this, as computers got commodified there still was a massive benefit to using cloud computing. Could it be possible that that happens with LLMs as well as hardware becomes more and more specialized? I personally have no idea but love that there’s a bunch of competition and totally agree with your point regulation and export controls are just ways to make it harder for new orgs to compete.

AznHisoka• 5 months ago

Anthropic at least seems to be doing well with enterprises. OpenAI doesnt have that level of trust with enterprise use cases, and commodization is a bigger issue with consumers, when they can just switch to another tool easily

SirensOfTitan2• 5 months ago

Yeah, Anthropic is inarguably in a better position, but I don’t see how they justify their fundraising unless they find some entrenched position that is difficult for competitors to replicate.

Enterprise switching costs aren’t 0, but they’re much less than most other categories, especially as models mature and become more fungible.

The best moat I can think of is a patentable technique that facilitates a huge leap that Anthropic can defend, but even then, Chinese companies could easily ignore those patents. And I don’t even know if AI companies could stick to those guns as their training is essentially theft of huge portions of copyrighted material.

nvarsj• 5 months ago

I don't think you can put OpenAI and Anthropic together like that.

Anthropic has actually cracked Agentic AI that is generally useful. No other company has done that.

enceladus06• 5 months ago

OpenAI and Anthropic don't have a moat. We will have actual open models like DeepSeek and Kimi with the same functionality as Opus 4.6 in Claude Code <6mo IMO. Competition is a good thing for the end-user.

zozbot2344• 5 months ago

The open-weight models are great but they're roughly a full year behind frontier models. That's a lot. There's also a whole lot of uses where running a generic Chinese-made model may be less than advisable, and OpenAI/Anthropic have know-how for creating custom models where appropriate. That can be quite valuable.

jnovek• 5 months ago

I just did a test project using K2.5 on opencode and, for me, it doesn’t even come close to Claude Code. I was constantly having to wrangle the model to prevent it from spewing out 1000 lines at once and it couldn’t hold the architecture in its head so it would start doing things in inconsistent ways in different parts of the project. What it created would be a real maintenance nightmare.

It’s much better than the previous open models but it’s not yet close.

lvl155• 5 months ago

Think LLM by itself is basically a commodity at this point. Not quite interchangeable but it’s more of artistic differences rather than technological. I used to think it was data and that would give companies like Google a leg up.

KoolKat23• 5 months ago

Anthropic I feel will be alright. They have their niche, it's good and people actually do pay for their services. Why do people still use salesforce when there's other free CRM's. They also haven't from what I can tell scaled for some imaginary future growth.

OpenAI I'm sorry to say are all over the place. They're good at what they do, but they try to do too much and need near ponzi style growth to sustain their business model.

llm_nerd• 5 months ago

Anthropic, at least, has gone to lengths to avoid hardware lock-in or being open to extortion of the nvidia variety. Anthropic is running their models on nvidia GPUs, but also Amazon Trainium and Google's TPUs. Massive scale-outs on all three, so clearly they've abstracted their operations enough that they aren't wed to CUDA or anything nvidia-specific.

Similarly, OpenAI has made some massive investments in AMD hardware, and have also ensured that they aren't tied to nvidia.

I think it's nvidia that has less of a moat than many imagine they do, given that they're a $4.5T company. While small software shops might define their entire solution via CUDA, to the large firms this is just one possible abstraction engine. So if an upstart just copy pastes a massive number of relatively simple tensor cores and earns their business, they can embrace it.

idopmstuff• 5 months ago

I do think the models themselves will get commoditized, but I've come around to the opinion that there's still plenty of moat to be had.

On the user side, memory and context, especially as continual learning is developed, is pretty valuable. I use Claude Code to help run a lot of parts of my business, and it has so much context about what I do and the different products I sell that it would be annoying to switch at this point. I just used it to help me close my books for the year, and the fact that it was looking at my QuickBooks transactions with an understanding of my business definitely saved me a lot of time explaining.

On the enterprise side, I think businesses are going to be hesitant to swap models in and out, especially when they're used for core product functionality. It's annoying to change deterministic software, and switching probabilistic models seems much more fraught.

999900000999• 5 months ago

They'll ban Chinese models, or do something like calling them security risks without proof.

Enterprise customers will gladly pay 10x to 20x for American models. Of course this means American tech companies will start to fall behind, combined with our recent Xenophobia.

Almost all the top AI researchers are either Chinese nationals or recent immigrants. With the way we've been treating immigrants lately ( plenty of people with status have been detained, often for weeks), I can't imagine the world's best talent continuing to come here.

It's going to be an interesting decade y'all.

sigmar2• 5 months ago

various open-weighted Chinese models out there. They've kept good pace with flagship models,

I don't think this is accurate. Maybe it will change in the future but it seems like the Chinese models aren't keeping up with actually training techniques, they're largely using distillation techniques. Which means they'll always be catching up and never at the cutting edge. https://x.com/Altimor/status/2024166557107311057

A_D_E_P_T• 5 months ago

they're largely using distillation techniques. Which means they'll always be catching up and never at the cutting edge.

You link to an assumption, and one that's seemingly highly motivated.

Have you used the Chinese models? IMO Kimi K2.5 beats everything but Opus 4.6 and Gemini 3.1... and it's not exactly inferior to the latter, it's just different. It's much better at most writing tasks, and its "Deep Research" mode is by a wide margin the best in the business. (OpenAI's has really gone downhill for some reason.)

arthurcolle• 5 months ago

I have been using a quorum composed of step-3.5-flash, Kimi k2.5 and glm-5 and I have found it outperforms opus-4.5 at a fraction of the cost

That's pretty cutting edge to me.

EDIT: It's not a swarm — it's closer to a voting system. All three models get the same prompt simultaneously via parallel API calls (OpenAI-compatible endpoints), and the system uses weighted consensus to pick a winner. Each model has a weight (e.g. step-3.5-flash=4, kimi-k2.5=3, glm-5=2) based on empirically observed reliability.

The flow looks like:

  1. User query comes in
  2. All 3 models (+ optionally a local model like qwen3-abliterated:8b) get called in parallel
  3. Responses come back in ~2-5s typically
  4. The system filters out refusals and empty responses
  5. Weighted voting picks the winner — if models agree on tool use (e.g. "fetch this URL"), that action executes
  6. For text responses, it can also synthesize across multiple candidates

The key insight is that cheap models in consensus are more reliable than a single expensive model. Any one of these models alone hallucinates or refuses more than the quorum does collectively. The refusal filtering is especially useful — if one model over-refuses, the others compensate.

Tooling: it's a single Python agent (~5200 lines) with protocol-based tool dispatch — 110+ operations covering filesystem, git, web fetching, code analysis, media processing, a RAG knowledge base, etc. The quorum sits in front of the LLM decision layer, so the agent autonomously picks tools and chains actions. Purpose is general — coding, research, data analysis, whatever. I won't include it for length but I just kicked off a prompt to get some info on the recent Trump tariff Supreme Court decision: it fetched stock data from Benzinga/Google Finance, then researched the SCOTUS tariff ruling across AP, CNN, Politico, The Hill, and CNBC, all orchestrated by the quorum picking which URLs to fetch and synthesizing the results, continuing until something like 45 URLs were fully processed. Output was longer than a typical single chatbot response, because you get all the non-determinism from what the models actually ended up doing in the long-running execution, and then it needs to get consensus, which means all of the responses get at least one or N additional passes across the other models to get to that consensus.

  Cost-wise, these three models are all either free-tier or pennies per million tokens. The entire session above (dozens of quorum rounds, multiple web fetches) cost less than a single Opus prompt.

parliament322• 5 months ago

Does that actually matter? If "catching up" means "a few months behind" at worst for.. free?

deepriverfish• 5 months ago

they might end up like Dropbox

34679• 5 months ago

I can't shake the feeling that the RAM shortage was intentionally created to serve as a sort of artificial moat by slowing or outright preventing the adoption of open weight models. Altman is playing with hundreds of billions of other people's dollars, trying to protect (in his mind) a multi-trillion dollar company. If he could spend a few billion to shut down access to the hardware people need to run competitor's products, why wouldn't he?

tmaly2• 5 months ago

Hard drives and GPUs seem to be facing the same fate.

zozbot2344• 5 months ago

It's very difficult to "intentionally create" a real shortage. You can hoard as much as you want, but people will expect you to dump it all right back onto the market unless you really have a higher-value use for the stuff you hoarded (And then you didn't intentionally create anything, you just bought something you needed!).

Plus producers will now feel free to expand production and dump even more onto the market. This is great if you needed that amount of supply, but it's terrible if you were just trying to deprive others.

chasd0011• 5 months ago

From what I understand the RAM producers see the writing on the wall. They’re not going to invest in massively more capacity only to have it sit completely idle in 10 years.

RAM shortage is probably a bubble indicator itself. That industry doesn’t believe enough in the long term demand to build out more capacity.

ahussain• 5 months ago

People were saying the same last year, and then Anthropic launched Claude Code which is already at a $2.5B revenue run rate.

LLMs are useful and these companies will continue to find ways to capture some of the value they are creating.

tinyhouse2• 5 months ago

Openai is just playing catchup at this point, they completely lost thier way in my view.

Anthropic on the other hand is very capable and given the success of claude code and cowork, I think they will maintain their lead across knowledge work for a long time just by having the best data to keep improving their models and everything around. It's also the hottest tech conpany rn, like Google were back in the day.

If I need to bet on two companies that will win the AI race in the west, it's Anthropic and Google. Google on the consumer side mostly and Anthropic in enterprise. OpenAI will probably IPO soon to shift the risk to the public.

chasd0011• 5 months ago

If anthropic continues getting their foot in the enterprise door then maybe they can tap into enterprise cloud spending. If Athropic can come up with services and things (db, dns, networking, webservers, etc) that claudecode will then prefer then maybe they become a cloud provider. To me, and I am no business expert btw, that could be a path to sustainable financials.

Edit: one thing I didn’t think about is Anthropic more or less runs at the pleasure of AWS. Of Amazon sees Anthropic as a threat to AWS then it could be lights out.

munk-a• 5 months ago

OpenAI is not viable. OpenAI is spending like Google without a warchest and they have essentially nothing to offer outside of brand recognition. Nvidia propping them up to force AI training to be done on their chips vs. google in-house cores is their only viable path forward. Even if they develop a strong model the commitments they've made are astronomically out of reach of all but the largest companies and AI has proven to be a very low moat market. They can't demand a markup sufficient to justify that spend - it's too trivial to undercut them.

Google/Apple/Nvidia - those with warchests that can treat this expenditure as R&D, write it off, and not be up to their eyeballs in debt - those are the most likely to win. It may still be a dark-horse previously unknown company but if it is that company will need to be a lot more disciplined about expenditures.

cmiles8• 5 months ago

There are serious balance sheet concerns for these companies with exposure to OpenAI, Anthropic and such.

It’s all fun and games till it’s not. All this capital investment is going to start hitting earnings as massive deprecation and/or mark-to-market valuation adjustments and if the bubble pops (or even just cools a bit) the math starts to look real ugly real quick.

jimnotgym4• 5 months ago

The market is not there at all though is it? Nobody is paying what it actually costs to deliver AI services. It is not clear to me that it is cheaper than just paying people to do the work.

zerosizedweasle3• 5 months ago

Someone did a calculation using heat generated - energy usage (which is ultimately the base cost of the universe) - and the human brain and body is just incredibly most cost efficient than how we're doing AI. So for basic tasks it's just absurdly expensive to be using AI instead of a human.

jimnotgym4• 5 months ago

Now the only question is when. When does this bubble burst?

Great promise, replace all your call centre staff, then your developers with AI. It is cheaper, but only because the AI companies are not charging you what it really costs to do the work.

raw_anon_11118• 5 months ago

One of my specialties is implementing hosted call centers using Amazon Connect - the AWS version of the call center that Amazon uses internally.

The fully allocated cost of one call to a human agent is $3-5. That pays for a lot of inference.

rhubarbtree2• 5 months ago

pricing as an objection to ai is just cope. it might hurt the current status quo when they can no longer burn capital, but the long-term course will remain unchanged

nebula88044• 5 months ago

The fully allocated cost of one call to a human agent is $3-5.

Are you kidding me?! It costs that much for the utter trash that I have deal with every company? A poor 1990s VOIP sounding connection to some random place in the Philippines while I try to get my issue solved in excruciating annoyance when they cannot follow my standard english flow or they cannot speak loud or clearly.

aurizon2• 5 months ago

I wonder how the huge slug of memory that might now have to re-direct mid-ramp as this (and other AI pullbacks) ramify forward? Will Crucial re-enter the desktop market? Or will it create a slow/fast subsidence in memory? We will live in interesting times..

altairprime5• 5 months ago

Considering how gasoline pricing works, RAM prices will likely decay at 1/xth the rate that the grew, so that retailers can capture maximum profit per price point before lowering to the next, and manufacturers can hold the oversupply in reserve for more AI demand. I would expect possible sharp price drop events (depending on the overage levels) just after the end of e.g. Micron’s financial years, though, as they will have unloaded the overflow at discount bulk pricing enabling some retailers to undercut the pre-unload pricing and resuming somewhat rational market behavior.

overfeed5• 5 months ago

The next-financial-quarter-only mindset is just baiting CXMT into capturing >70% of the market, if they are able to scale their production. Once consumers trust the brand, it's all over for Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung's dominance.

baggachipz4• 5 months ago

Follow the ball... which shell is the ball under? Keep an eye on the ball!

hz231• 5 months ago

Good, AI is bad.

danielovichdk• 5 months ago

Idiots, this is a splendid example of circular economy.

OpenAi gets 30b, buys chips from nvidia for 30b.

How is that an investment?

chasd0011• 5 months ago

OpenAi gets 30b, buys chips from nvidia for 30b.

well if OpenAi uses a credit card at least they'll get a ton of rewards points :)

HDThoreaun3• 5 months ago

NVDA has more money than they know what to do with. One strategy when you have extra money is investing it in equities. You exchange money for a slice of future profits. Not sure what the confusion is here

bentt• 5 months ago

OpenAI is going to have to leapfrog everyone else with some kind of alien tech to remain viable. Nvidia is probably just saving face here and possibly hedging.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 5 months ago

Nvidia has to hedge because if they go from a growth stock to a de-growth stock in a year - their P/E is going to go from 45 to 10 real fast.

caconym_2• 5 months ago

Does this mean I will be able to buy RAM for the NAS build I left too late (stupid me assuming I could rely on some basic modicum of price stability)? I assume not.

I have the disks but only random old gaming PCs to put them in. I think I'm going to expand my Proxmox cluster and run Ceph so that I don't have to pay that 6x markup or whatever the fuck it is these days.

I'm tired, man. I'm tired of living in this world where AI is simultaneously an unstoppable eschatological juggernaut that's already making everything worse and at best is going to steal my livelihood and destroy my family's future, but also a hype driven shell game with full buy-in from world leaders and the moneyed elite who see a golden opportunity to extract unprecedented amounts of wealth for themselves before the West falls and they have to make other arrangements.

mmastrac• 5 months ago

You can find DDR4 at reasonable prices, assuming it's not DDR4 ECC, and assuming it's not a QNAP that will only boot with RAM from a very narrow window of compatibility (ask me how I know).

kasabali3• 5 months ago

I don't know where this myth comes from, DDR4 prices have quadrupled since July.

paxys3• 5 months ago

99% of hobbyist and small business use cases can be served by hardware from 5-10 years which is still relatively cheap. You don't need to compete with Nvidia for brand new DDR5 RAM for your basement NAS.

kasabali3• 5 months ago

Nah. Even goddamn 8GB DDR3 modules have tripled in price. SSD prices, similarly.

caconym_2• 5 months ago

Wow, thank you for this incredibly valuable perspective. I guess I should just be happy I can still own my computers!

overfeed5• 5 months ago

Even DDR3(!) prices have surged - and that's from 20 years ago. Many people realized what you outlined - or just bought what was available, which resulted in higher demand for older tech. Higher demand + constant supply = higher prices.

alsetmusic3• 5 months ago

Ed Zitron is gonna have a field day with this. He wrote / spoke about the dark horses of the AI apocalypse a year or more ago. Scaling back investment was one of the signs he predicted would signal its start.

I like his podcast, Better Offline[0]. Some here might also like it, some would definitely hate it. He's not right about everything he says, but I agree with a lot of it. He has a newsletter for those who don't like podcasts.

0. https://www.betteroffline.com

altairprime5• 5 months ago

He often gets some airtime on HN for the AI stuff; see also past discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=zitron

cootsnuck• 5 months ago

Ed is the anger translator in my head. Good stuff.

g-mork• 5 months ago

The irony with Zitron is that summarising his astoundingly verbose anti-AI articles is one of the most consistently productive uses I've had for AI

joshcsimmons• 5 months ago

Ed's background is PR not engineering FWIW.

rubatuga• 5 months ago

Wow everything he said is coming true /s

chasd0011• 5 months ago

Scaling back investment was one of the signs he predicted would signal its start.

hah Nvidia just announced the deal with OpenAI is now $30B instead of $100B.

astrange2• 5 months ago

There are certainly some good AI critics but Ed Zitron and Gary Marcus are not among them. They're just people who get paid to write anti-AI newsletters whether or not any of it is true.

deanmoriarty• 5 months ago

Really hard for me to understand why the average HN commenter has an almost cultish behavior towards Anthropic, they are somehow excused for all their sins whereas everything OpenAI does is taken in the most uncharitable way. It’s a very consistent pattern.

recitedropper• 5 months ago

Starts with "astro" and ends with "turfing".

Think about how valuable HN is for a company whose primary market is professional devs.

QuadmasterXLII• 5 months ago

There is some need for moral dynamic range. Anthropic is quite bad and there's lots of room at the bottom for OpenAI to be remarkably worse.

mikkupikku2• 5 months ago

Why Nvidia would want to invest in prospecting firms instead of just selling pickaxes never made sense to me in the first place.

dmix• 5 months ago

Maybe they have too much money from selling so make pickaxes and chose to reinvest into the industry that keeps funneling them money.

mikkupikku2• 5 months ago

I just don't get it. If they have too much money, don't the shareholders want dividends? If I were a shareholder I'd be pissed that Nvidia is trying to be part of the bubble instead of taking all the cream off the top.

damnitbuilds• 5 months ago

2026 in AI: Superbowl ads, IPOs, bankruptcies.

DonHopkins2• 5 months ago

That creepy AI dog-tracking Superbowl ad is dystopian enough -- especially when even South Park is now mocking Homeland Security and Noem shooting puppies -- and it's likely a future episode will be about federal ICE agents using surveillance cams and AI to round up more dogs for her to shoot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcAUmeH8Obk

vaxman• 5 months ago

OpenAI is not worth $860B to anyone other than to the companies hoping to inflate their own valuations by selling it goods and services, at least until OpenAI inevitably goes to zero and its assets are acquired for substantially less than $30B. It simply does not cost $30B to build an OpenAI competitor and the opportunity cost of building one also isn't approaching $30B (unless one accounts for the stock hit from investor FOMO over such a delay, as, for example, Apple knows all too well).

If OpenAI were one of many companies generally promoting the increased use of GPUs in industry, thereby developing the market that nVidia operates in, that would be one thing, but $30B, to one company, that then gets spent on nVidia purchases? Just, No. nVidia will get into a lot of trouble for doing this kind of deal that undermines confidence in the entire stock market.

bmitch30202• 5 months ago

http://archive.today/I9MoI

Nvidia and OpenAI abandon unfinished $100B deal in favour of $30B investment

Related Stories