> Gosh, I have a coworker who acts like gaming GPUs are the only hardware that matters.
> I've tried explaining that one or two AI data center clients for Nvidia dwarfs the entire gaming GPU market, but he just doesn't get it.
I have a feeling that the different judgements come from the fact that the coworker thinks that the AI bubble will soon burst - thus, in his judgement, the AI data center sector of Nvidia is insanely overvalued, and will collapse. What will "save" Nvidia then will be the gaming GPUs. Thus, in his opinion, this is the sector that matters most for Nvidia, since it will become Nvidia's lifeline when (not "if"! - in your coworker's judgement) things will go wrong in AI.
You, on the other hand believe AI data centers are here to stay (which is a bold assumption: it could happen that AI will move more to the edge), and no big competition will arise for NVidia for "big AI ASICs" (another bold assumption). Your judgment is based on these two strong assumptions about the future, while your coworker's is based on different (possibly similarly bold) assumptions.
The company will unlikely make it through a collapse like that. It’s like Netflix going back to DVDs via mail.
The market is so tiny that their capex investments into AI stuff would catch them with massive debt that the gaming revenue couldn’t support and they would have to go through bankruptcy
> Data centers and enterprise will always dwarf consumer hardware.
Before the current AI hype, except for some rather specialized applications, people had rather little use for GPU acceleration (GPGPU) in data centers.
Consumer hardware is where the innovation slowly starts though. Without the years of people messing with GPGPU on consumer hardware we might not have got the AI revolution on GPUs.
Around 15 years ago in college, I took the opposite position that datacenter workloads mattered more to Nvidia’s future than gaming and no one believed me. It is amazing how times have changed.
I used to work for Oracle in their datacenter hardware module.
The scale of the orders that datacenters put in is insane. It's literally 1000:1 vs consumer stuff.
While building a single server I could easily handle 2-3 million dollars worth of hardware. We'd roll out 50 of those in a week. That was just my shift and we had several.
Gamers and consumers simply dont understand the scale that datacenters work at.
Gaming was sort of their major thing until the cryptocurrency wave gave them a major boost and GPUs were rare luxuries suddenly. But as crypto was fading and GPUs were suddenly becoming affordable, GenAI wave hit and again gave a major boost. Am curious how they will react to quantum(sadly no magical enterprise application apparent yet so the tail wind is not strong).
simulations. Drugs work in the brain at a quantum level, and if we could simulate what a drug does before testing on live humans, that would change the world.
I've tried explaining that one or two AI data center clients for Nvidia dwarfs the entire gaming GPU market, but he just doesn't get it.