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I was watching a Gamers Nexus video ranting about Nvidia abandoning the PC market. He was enraged, and I felt his rage. I like PCs too! I'd like to enjoy building a new one again, with brand new screaming fast parts I'm excited to take for a spin.
Alas, the angrier Steve gets, the more money Nvidia makes, and I've certainly enjoyed my 5000% gains and my new dividend that's over 20% of my initial investment yearly. When your cost basis is $4, a $1 yearly dividend feels insane. I know that's not how you do the math, but it's still wild to think about.
So I'm talking to my wife about that, and how it feels a little wrong to be doing so well off of a company that is acting so against my principles and interest. But damnit, I've got bills to pay, and I'm not gonna be the only chump not getting my bag.
This is crazy haha. How did you manage not to sell when it 10xed? Or 20xed? Or 30xed? Etc.? Did you forget about it, or do you have some sort of "no selling before I retire" approach?
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I wonder if the GPU market will bifurcate such that AMD just takes over the PC gaming sector, with Nvidia just abandoning it altogether. I don't know what the state of things is with respect to AMD's chips running AI, but as of a couple years ago, it seemed to require a ton of hacks to make it work at a small fraction of the speed as on Nvidia's chips. But AMD's chips still render games nearly as well as Nvidia's.
One major problem is that local GPUs seem heavily likely to be relied upon to do generative-AI-related processing in future games, and so Nvidia seems likely to have the edge for PC gaming GPUs as well. I personally got a 4090 back when that was still top-of-the-line, explicitly because I knew I wanted to use it for generative AI - I never even considered getting an AMD at all, no matter how much of a better deal it might be for my gaming needs. And that pattern could repeat over and over again going forward.
We might need a sort of government-mandated splitting of Nvidia in the future or something, though obviously that has its own issues, and the cure could very well be worse than the disease.
AMD also doesn't care about the desktop. For a time it looked like Intel might make an effort, but the rumors are consistently that they've killed that line of products.
Nobody is coming to save us.
Time to be the change I want to see in this world!
"Claude 6.9, generate a step-by-step plan that a sub-100 IQ individual with ADHD and chronic procrastination issues can and WILL follow for starting my own company that will produce GPUs that are compatible with current standard PC hardware and software, at performance levels roughly equivalent to current top-of-the-line models produced by existing companies in the field. Starting capital: about tree fiddy. Make no mistakes."
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I'm in a weird place with Nvidia. I'm invested in them indirectly through various funds, but I'm getting a little concerned.
In my neck of the woods, you can't buy 2B limestone anymore. It doesn't matter how much money you have, the quarries are completely tapped on supply. They can only sell at the rate they can get it out of the ground. Since you need that for leveling foundations and making concrete, that must be slowing down data center construction. If that's true, and something like 80% or more of Nvidia's revenue is from data center build outs, I worry what even a small to medium hiccup in construction could do. How long could they sit on inventory before investors get antsy?
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