| At the end of the day, what nvidia does is just producing IP. All manufacture is by other companies. This means that nvidia capital is spend on testing/development infrastructure and creative labor. So, you don’t need monopoly breaking to handle nvidia if it keeps growing, but instead rethink IP laws. Testing infrastructure is less capital investment than production manufacture. (See ASML and TSMC beeing booked), and humans can be persuaded to work elsewhere. This means Nvidia cannot fall a sleep, even if they keep snowballing. In a few years a rival can always arrive, or current ones snag key people or have dev/test infra breakthrough, or IP law could change as its critics rise every year. Sure, if Nvidia keeps its good game it will keep on growing and get even bigger share, but if it doesn’t, it will happen what happened with intel, intel got greedy on its position, and the company got fat. As long as nvidia keeps its game, it’ll be good for customers even if they swallow more market share, as prices are always limited by the value business customers get from AI, and the investment needed for a competitor is not even close to infrastructure or resource extraction stuff like high end chip fabs, oil extraction, energy grids, telecom grids. Again, Nvidia does not produce any physical goods, only designs. |
With Nvidia and other GPU competitors being IP-focused, effectively outsourcing all this "manufacturing stuff" (to the same 3rd party much of the time), that's one less thing for them to keep up with, and one less think that'll hurt if they do start "falling asleep". I can't see this happening to Nvidia in quite the same way right now. My point was that not having manufacturing makes advantages of consolidation larger, not smaller.
I wonder what would have happened if Intel realized it's manufacturing wasn't hitting targets and "quickly" added TSMC as an option, would AMD even have had a chance with ryzen? There was clearly a time when AMD had superior manufacturing processes through them, if Intel's designs of the time were on the same process would they have managed to grab the headlines?
And no, I Strongly disagree that NVidia running unchecked over the entire market being "Good for consumers", and not sure if the capital expenditure of getting over this moat is really much smaller than things like resource acquisition or infrastructure, they have $billions in current software ecosystems and hardware designs. Those $billions probably could buy you a fair bit of infrastructure investment on the scale you mentioned. Look how much Intel is burning right now just to get a toe into the market and not laughed out the door - and they're still clearly behind their competitors right now. Their chips aren't anywhere near competitive from a performance-per-area point of view, and their software is rather poor for the vast majority of use cases.