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by makeitdouble 422 days ago
But then they're not boosting NVidia's competitors either, so wouldn't NVidia stay in the top position in their market ?

The article seems focused more on stock price and where to bet, than the market for GPUs or generic hardware vendors.

2 comments

> But then they're not boosting NVidia's competitors either, so wouldn't NVidia stay in the top position in their market ?

Nope; if hypothetically 100% left NVidia, whether to their own hardware or to not use GPUs at all, it'd be easy to say NVidia would be last in the market

Are you arguing that the major cloud providers getting away from consumer GPUs would put AMD or Intel ahead of Nvidia in the GPU market ? How does that happen when the next biggest market (gaming) is still fully Nvidia's turf?
> Are you arguing that the major cloud providers getting away from consumer GPUs would put AMD or Intel ahead of Nvidia in the GPU market ?

Just the hypothetical "if X% of your customers leave, but don't go to competitors, won't you keep your relative market position"

He's talking about datacenter GPUs which are not really GPUs.

Gaming is not entirely Nvidia's turf either. AMD has 75% of the console market (Xbox and Playstation) and 30% of the PC market.

> AMD has 75% of the console market (Xbox and Playstation) and 30% of the PC market.

Looking at these numbers[0] for the console market:

> Sony has sold 61.94M units of PS5 and Microsoft has sold 30.14M units of Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch sold 143.49M units.

Nintendo (NVidia chip) sold 1.5x of Sony and Microsoft combined. Given Switch's success the numbers look reliable to me, then Switch 2 is of course also from Nvidia, and I wouldn't be against it selling well.

[0] https://hookedontech.com/switch-vs-ps5-vs-series-x-console-g...

Old numbers. PS5 has sold 75 million

https://www.ign.com/articles/ps5-has-best-holiday-ever-overa...

In terms of revenue, AMD has the vast majority of the console market.

Yes the Switch sold more units, but that is a smaller SOC with much lower revenue.

Revenue and profit is what matters, not the number of units sold.

Check the price of the PS5 Pro vs Switch.

AMD has dominated the console market since Xbox One / PS4.

Nvidia could be earning $30 - $50 per Switch, while AMD earns $120 - $200 per PS5/PS5 Pro.

By switching to their own hardware, they become NVidia's competitors.
That's kind of arguing that people cooking at home are restaurants' competitors.

There's a kernel of truth in it, but if I was McDonalds I'd care a lot more about what KFC is doing than the market trends of cast iron pans.

I'd say so, yes. If I'm McDonald's and me and kfc are down, but Ralph's is up, I'd suspect a worrying trend about my industry.

It's kind of like how people may make fun of YouTube seeing TikTok as a competitor. But you dig deeper and realize why they decided to get into short for content.

Bad analogy

90% of Nvidia's revenue is from datacenters.

If the datacenters stop buying Nvidia's products, and use their own hardware instead, then Nvidia loses 90% of its revenue.

> Nvidia loses 90% of its revenue.

These 90% will be a flash in the pan, same way the COVID revenue was for mask sellers. Sure it feels bad from Nvidia's perspective, but we also can understand that the AI boom would not have kept Nvidia skyrocketing infinitely anyway.

No, you wouldn't, not if that market trend causes your revenue to plummet. Changes in the size of the market matter just as much as market share.
The 3, multi-trillion dollar hyperscalers using their own GPUs are individuals cooking at home? And Nvidia is the “restaurants”?
I'd say yes. We see the same dynamic with megacorp building in-house kitchens and paying staff to feed their employees, who stop going into restaurants at lunch.

It's a huge shift, but not something that can be acted by Nvidia, nor something they had to care about 5 years ago, nor a primary concern 5 years from now. On the long scale, it's almost as if the big fireworks that pushed Nvidia to its curent valuation just disappears and they're back to selling GPUs to OEMs and consumers primarily.