Chipmaker Nvidia became the first public company in history to scale a $4tn market value on Wednesday as its stock price continues a years-long stratospheric rise.
Shares of the top chip designer rose roughly 2.4% to $164, benefiting from the ongoing surge in demand for artificial intelligence technologies. Nvidia’s chips and associated software are considered world leaders for building artificial intelligence products.
Nvidia achieved a $1tn market value for the first time back in June 2023 and the surge continued unabated with its market value – the total value of its shares – more than tripling in about a year, faster than Apple and Microsoft, the only other US firms with a market value of more than $3tn. Apple was the first company to reach a valuation of $3tn, back in 2022.
And it is people on Medicaid not working for handouts, huh?
It’s gonna be real shitty when this bubble bursts.
I was gonna say “funny.”
This is why the US desperately needs progressive antitrust legislation
How could Nvidia be broken up? It’s the same GPU silicon being sold for gaming and AI. Gaming doesn’t even matter to them so if you broke out gaming into a separate company, they’d still be a monopoly.
Imo, it wouldn’t be a problem if they were taxed. The value they generate would go back to the people.
This is not an industry where you want a monopoly. If they had more companies to compete with, then more taxes would be paid. But, regardless of how many competitors they have, if they paid more taxes then they wouldn’t have quite the market value that they do.
The whole reason these companies have such insane market values is because they’ve spent so much time and money artificially inflating their stock prices and by raising the barriers for entry into their industries
I dunno if OP meant so, but Nvida’s value is propped up entirely by big tech hyper scalers. If they got broken up years ago, we wouldn’t have to watch them pour an unholy amount of money into a dead end technology in a desperate search for a new thing to monopolize.
If they got broken up years ago
The problem is how do you break up a design team? My experience in hardware industry is that its a very tiny team of people making doing the silicon design and then hundreds/thousands of support engineers doing support hardware (like board layout that the chips will go on), software drivers and testing.
I meant the big tech firms buying nvidia gpus and driving up the share price. If Google/FB/Amazon/etc got broken up, they wouldn’t be trying to squeeze infinite money out of so called AI and nvidia wouldn’t be a $4 trillion balloon.
I don’t think nvidia could be broken up much like you say, but it’s still only worth so much because of all the other monopolies (that’d be easier to break up) paying into it.
If there were more Google/FB/Amazons there would be even more hardware purchases because there would be more companies competing to dominate AI.
No if they didn’t already dominate their respective markets, they’d have to actually compete against other companies. In a competitive market, there would be no reason to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into LLMs which are unprofitable, inaccurate, and have very limited use cases. AI wouldn’t be a bubble if these companies had any incentive to make good products and competition is supposed to be that incentive.
Maybe down the line, the tech sector would’ve had an AI boom anyway. As it stands however, there is no real race to dominate AI. It’s a scramble to try to sell LLMs as intelligent so they can get AI money without actual AI tech.
In a competitive market, there would be no reason to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into LLMs which are unprofitable, inaccurate, and have very limited use cases.
That’s not how capitalism works at all. Companies are spending money on AI because they need to compete against other companies. You might not like it for all the very good reasons you gave, but consumers are using AI so companies are trying to provide it. In the absence of competition, companies do not spend money chasing risky new revenue streams but milk their existing base.
If there was only Microsoft, and no other software company on the planet, Microsoft would not spend money on AI because they wouldn’t need to.
A big part of Marx’s criticism of capitalism is the waste it creates through duplication of effort.
Nvidia will not be negatively affected when the AI bubble slowly deflates (because it won’t pop). They’re always working on the next thing, which today seems to be advanced robotics
