So what are the odds that the other GPU and memory companies have been doing the exact same thing, and it’s all been collusion? Previous times the memory chip makers were found to be price fixing and colluding, their were fines and it was caught relatively soon. This time around the government is so corrupt and inept that it’s been going on for ages.
We already know the memory cartel can’t be trusted whatsoever due to their past collusion, so I’d assume they’re a part of it.
AMD is run by Jensen’s cousin.
Intel is partially owned by the US government.
So I’d say the odds are high.
Anti-trust and price fixing and all that shit has the limpest noodle of a cock for enforcement. But you jaywalk or so much as paint outside the box and the government rushes to put your ass in a sling.
So then… why weren’t they selling them for dirt cheap?
Oh yeah because “supply and demand” isn’t a science like they want you to believe, it’s just a tool they use to rationalize their exploitation of working class consumers and a compass to guide their market manipulation.
"supply and demand” isn’t a science
It’s a relationship uses to describe how one affects the other. It’s like Force = Mass × Acceleration. It’s not technically a science, but it can be used to make predictions based on observations, which can have some scientific applications.
Yes but the relationship isn’t as fixed and immutable as Force = Mass × Acceleration, or Watts = Volts × Amps.
That’s what I mean by it isn’t a science. A soft science at best, but more like a pseudoscience.
There are so many other factors that go into pricing than simply Supply & Demand. Much more significant in our economy is the whim of the supplier and the degree to which they’ve either captured the market or colluded with their so-called competitors, and the neverending obsession with “line go up.”
Necessity is another such factor. Insulin is easy to produce. There’s no shortage of it. But they charge you out the ass for it because if you don’t pay it, you die. That’s different from demand, because demand is about how much is needed (quantity), whereas necessity is about how badly it’s needed.
So in practice “supply and demand” is often used to hand-wave or explain away things like excessive inflation (more accurately greedflation), when the reality is these corporations are making record profits. Because this isn’t about relative abundance of goods, this is about deliberate price gouging.
Which, along with enshittification and stagnating wages, is a completely predictable consequence of an economic philosophy which claims infinite growth is both possible and desirable. And our entire economic system is built upon the compulsion towards infinite growth.
Supply and demand is a science, and it’s that predictability that enables entities with large capital access to artificially limit supply to enforce market conditions preferential to them. (De beers).
The free market is an idealised model which requires physically impossible assumptions to function. Regulation and approximations are what are required to ensure that the free market will tend towards balanced supply and demand instead of over-sized entities (monopolies and oligopolies) to exercise outsized market control. A slightly imperfect free market is still great, a grossly imperfect one is barely different from feudalism.
In other words, we have anti-monopoly regulations for a reason. The problem arises when those with the power to control the entities with outsized influence are instead bought by them.
(I am absolutely not pro free market btw, but it is a valid model for human behaviour when its assumptions are close enough to be approximated)
What’s this about German beers?
We’re just talking about the Bock market.
You have some good points, but I disagree that supply and demand is a science. I think the evidence is abundant that it’s merely a social construct and only behaves somewhat according to its own theory because enough people believe in its reality for it to be self-perpetuating. A sufficient change in paradigm could reveal a very different dynamic.
As for free-markets, I believe a large part of the issues we’re seeing today can be traced back to the confusion/conflation of “free markets” with “capitalism.”
Free markets have existed for as long as humans have been bartering. They existed in the ancient Greek agoras, along the Silk road, and pretty much anywhere archeologists have discovered some form of currency or trade.
Capitalism is an early-modern invention based on the ownership and transfer of capital; i.e. trading of stocks or shares in the ownership of a company, which then hires executives, administrators, managers, etc., all delegated to perform their functions within a daisy chain of middlemen, all with the purpose of extracting as much profit as possible from the resources of the environment and the laborers who actually produce the value.
It’s completely different from free market. Capitalism can (and does currently) exist without a free market. Free markets likewise can exist (and have existed) without capitalism.
You can have free markets in a socialistic economy. The only difference is the workers own the means of production, which can take the form of employee-owned co-ops governed by democratic labor unions. That and the purpose of the economy isn’t to extract profit for the benefit of capital, but rather to provide for the needs of society.
Food, water, utilities, housing, clothes, safety, healthcare, education, etc., these are all necessary things in society that take some participation of its members to provide. But there’s no reason why any of that needs to be provided for the sole purpose of extracting profits. That’s just the current economic system we live in.
Comfort items, leisure activity equipment, recreational and creative endeavors, etc., aren’t exactly necessities as particulars (i.e., nobody needs a set of golf clubs), but as a category, these things are a social need, as society needs to provide the option of exploring such things if it wants to be considered a free, fair, just, equitable, and thriving/flourishing society.
And a free market is a decent system for providing those options, because (for example) if there’s demand for art supplies, somebody will make a livelihood providing those things. But as soon as it becomes about producing profit for shareholders (i.e. capital) then it becomes soulless, toxic, and destructive.
Nvidia has reportedly contacted TSMC to wind down their chip orders.
We can hope that soon prices will come down.
Let’s hope nobody else continues the sabotage operation. Unfortunately, we see in different places how some people continue to chase doomed paths. Lying and deception are all part of these shitty, destructive operations.
I don’t quite remember, too few chip producers was one problem, but low number of big buyers another. Was Nvidia a big enough part of buyers? Will the other big buyers simply eat up what Nvidia frees now?
The ridiculous AI build out has resulted in inflation, and the ECB has started ramping up interest rates in response. When investors no longer have easy access to free money, they can no longer subsidize the AI industry. Microsoft has already started laying off people, anticipating the crash. Apparently Nvidia isn’t feeling the pressure yet, but they will. Eventually data centers won’t be buying chips any more, and that’s when the chip prices should drop back to normal.
Imagining that all these wafers have to end up on the market and the price of GPUs and RAM becomes affordable again is a nice fantasy but unfortunately I think they will bury these chips in the ground before they let the price go down again.
That depends on how desperate they get. If their loans get called, they might be forced to sell some.
I think one major issue is how far along the manufacturing process the warehoused products are. If they are completed cards waiting to be put into computers then it may have the opposite effect of driving prices up as they need to cover costs of wasted capacity from previous years.
If they are still possible to be integrated into other cards, then they might end up on the market.
It’s not like it’s a bunch of 5090s that consumers would buy.
When they get liquidated in bankruptcies, it’s all fair game
Nvdia is the only company in the AI bubble that won’t fail.
They were the general store selling everyone else pickaxes
Do you know what happened to the circular financing companies in the the dotcom bust?
I used to think that, but with the news in the last few days, I could be convinced that they’ll come out with some lasting injuries.
Multiple affair allegations are bad. The Chinese spy scandal is worse. The Chinese pipeline of GPUs is criminal. But, reports that they may have been pivotal to the global memory/GPU shortage? That’s damning in a way that could really fuck them over financially, if not criminally. Jensen Huang has accomplices within the company, and he’s going to drag some of them down with him.
And I don’t think we’re even done with the skeletons in the closet.
This is a more thought out version of what I wanted to say.
Like just wait until they can’t find an excuse not to implicate the whole company in insane treason
Having lost near to a third of their value, I don’t think they’re invulnerable. Probably they’d be bought long before they’d go bankrupt though.
What company can afford to buy the second most valuable company on the planet?
You missed the part where their stock price plunges first.
What company country can afford to buy the second most valuable company on the planet?
FTFY. They are way too in bed with the defense sector to get sold. They’ll get bailed out and nationalized.
Uh oh
Every word uttered by a conservative is deception or manipulation. Never, ever trust the word of a conservative, especially a rich one.
Maybe a 500 billion fine could boost the american economy. Also a long jail visit for the CEO, as an example. To show that we don’t like it when they risk causing an economic depression.
500 billion kills the company, leaving only Intel and AMD, back to duopoly status. AMD is also AI-first, dunno about Intel.
Fine them an amount that hurts the stock price hard, but leaves them in business at least.
We absolutely should sentence them all at once to capital punishment, but not before making them say even the latest of their secrets, so their IP becomes public domain. Protecting the confidentiality of information that’s essential for our modern civilization to survive should be certainly one of the worst crimes to ever exist, and I don’t even know how it’s legal to maintain some critical knowledge such as these as a secret.
Wake up RedGreenBlue! You were dozing off again.
Also, the US isn’t the only economy about to get bent over.
I’ll tell you what he’s not facing: an avalanche of inquiries on the collusion of Nvidia with the various fascist states (Chinese and American), corruption, market manipulation and financial misconduct on a grand scale. All this wife-cheating and James Bond spy business is just a diversion.
Apparently he sold off 1 billion USD worth of Nvidia stocks a week before the “spy” scandal broke. Potentially choreographed moves to gtfo while the going is good.
A different executive did I think, not Huang.
I think you’re referring to Mark Stevens
Let’s investigate him next after Elon and Zuck.
I’m sure the list will grow, too.
Let’s investigate him next after Elon and Zuck.
Why not do them all at the same time? There are enough shysters to sue the whoie lot of them many times over.
The human brain physically can’t multitask, so it’s one at a time for me /s
You’re right, there’s so much corruption to investigate that it could actually be a boon to the job market when investigating agencies hire enough support staff to be able to cover it all.
The smoke from the bonfires they will need to build to maintain scarcity will be visible from space
straight to jail
