[simoncion]

> Those servers still have to pay the same price for components...

Not if Nvidia is running the service.

Seems quite possible to me that Nvidia sells to the public just enough graphics cards to keep any frisky antitrust investigators off its back and reserves the rest for GeForce NOW, its "pay monthly for limited access to a remote gaming PC" service. The cards for NOW are billed to the BU running NOW at or below cost, the few cards available to consumers and System Integrators naturally have a huge markup due to extremely constrained supply, and Nvidia uses the fact that they are the thing behind the LLM Boom to ensure that they have -what a System Integrator in 2022 would recognize as- a reasonable price for just enough RAM for the computers that NOW rents access to.

Downvoters: notice the speculative nature of the previous paragraph. I'm not claiming that this is happening right now. I'm claiming that it's quite possibly more profitable for Nvidia to bill monthly for limited remote access to computers with Nvidia graphics cards in them than it is to sell those cards at retail and to SIs.

[Gigachad]

These kinds of conspiracies require everyone to collude, which just about never happens since the reward to defect increases. If nVidia tries this, they would just lose the market to AMD who would spam out as many GPUs to gamers as they could. If both AMD and nVidia teamed up, it would leave a gap that either intel or some Chinese startup would jump on.

It's just far more likely that these GPUs actually do cost a ton to make right now.

[simoncion]

> These kinds of conspiracies require everyone to collude...

No, only Nvidia makes and sells Nvidia GPUs. They're the sole supplier of the GPUs used in 95% of the graphics cards sold in the US.

> If both AMD and nVidia teamed up, it would leave a gap that either intel or some Chinese startup would jump on.

Fascinating.

a) Explain why the only even vaguely-recent cheap video cards were made by Intel, and why it looks like Intel has pretty much stopped making video cards? [0]

b) Tell me how that Chinese startup gets past USian Sinophobic/protectionist trade barriers?

c) Tell me how that Chinese startup convinces the big gaming development houses to ignore the advice of Nvidia's driver engineering team that just so happens to make their games work great on the hardware in NOW and really, really poorly on that unknown-to-US-customers Chinese startup?

> It's just far more likely that these GPUs actually do cost a ton to make...

You seem to have not been paying much attention to the reports of Nvidia, AMD, and major RAM and storage suppliers changing focus from the consumer market to the far more profitable datacenter (read as "LLM") market. Several such suppliers have exited the consumer space entirely. As any residential renter in San Francisco [1] can tell you, extremely limited supply drives price up to obscene levels.

[0] This shift in Intel's focus may or may not be related to Nvidia becoming the third- or fourth-largest Intel shareholder.

[1] ...or any other "hot" market with large, artificial barriers to entry...

[Gigachad]

Not sure the hostility is required here. Gamers don't need nvidia GPUs, they just need GPUs.

Nvidia happens to have been the best option for a long time. But there are many alternatives, game consoles for example aren't particularly tied to the Nvidia/amd market and the ARM space offers tons of options. Apple makes a powerful GPU for their macbooks that isn't dependent on either of the major two.

Valve, Sony, and Nintendo are in a good position to move away from AMD in the future if they aren't providing competitively priced GPUs. Valve has been working on an x86 emulator for ARM for their Steam Frame which would pave the way towards PC games running on ARM chips.

This whole situation is largely like this because demand for hardware spiked rapidly. Processes and production take a long time to change, and no one knows if these prices are long term or if it's going to crash back to normal in a year. If the elevated prices remain for the future, competitors will move in. But they aren't going to develop new products and production in the case where it all crashes back to normal and nvidia continues selling affordable GPUs to gamers.

I just don't see any scenario where nvidia remains the only option while also not selling their GPUs to consumers and requiring them to rent them. By the time that happens the competition would have crushed them.

[simoncion]

> Not sure the hostility is required here.

There's no hostility. I'm of the opinion that you're ignorant of the wider political and economic factors that have lead to us being in the situation under discussion. I know it's uncommon for the younger generations to believe that one can say "You're either ignorant or willfully blinding yourself to the entirety of the situation." as a statement of plain fact rather than an insult, but everyone would be better off if they'd permanently load that possibility into their brains.

Regardless, there's nothing two Internet Nobodies can say or do that will have any meaningful effect on the situation under discussion... so I guess we'll wait and see if -in five or ten years- "market forces" have made it so the overwhelming majority of "P"Cs are Chromebook-esque thin clients that are pretty much exclusively used to access subscription -or ad-laden- SAASes.