> 50% profit margins are obscene and a product of rent-seeky behaviour on their monopolisation of the gfx compute market.

For a sense of perspective, Nvidia’s operating margins as a company (including enterprise) are normally about the same as AMD’s gaming division (ie Radeon group). And Radeon is not exactly rolling in the cash…

This includes Ada, which had lower operating margins than any year since about 2012. https://i.imgur.com/KP6fClJ.png

They are making bank right now because they have a good product that has touched off a computing revolution. Just the same way AMD found themselves in a shower of money for having epyc ready to go at the moment intel stalled out on 10nm. This is transitory and won’t be a competitionless shower of money forever, but it will evolve into another large segment where nvidia is a player. But it's also an extremely deserved win for NVIDIA being in the right place at the right time (and that's hugely underselling NVIDIA's place in starting that revolution).

It’s super weird that people somehow begrudge nvidia their win from what is clearly a 20+ year bet on programmable shaders, gpgpu, and software ecosystem. Jensen bet the company over and over on shit that everyone else at the time said was lunacy, and utterly deserves the success he's earned. It is hard to overstate how much the "NVIDIA is a software company now" was mocked in the 2009-2014 era, it was a joke and a meme on tech forums in the same way "just buy it" or "the more you buy the more you save" is today. I'm sure there are some real choice SemiAccurate articles you can mine for laughs, Charlie is always great at that.

A large number of people cannot emotionally process the fact that electronics are just getting more expensive in the post-Moore's Law era and that GPUs are particularly exposed to this due to the nature of the product. But nobody else in the industry can do any better - MCM was a bust for AMD at driving down GPU costs, Intel is running negative margins to grow the product, etc. Even AMD is telling you the same thing - product costs are up, R&D costs are up, and the price anchors you knew in 2012 aren't going to hold forever.

(For that matter, there's no more $85 1600AF or $160 3600 deals anymore either - the era of "get last year's processor for, idk, does 75% off sound fair?" is completely dead in the CPU world too. And ASPs are up too - "mainstream" CPU is $300-350 now too. But people just don't have the narrative fed to them on CPUs, there is nobody telling them to be mad about it, so they aren't...)

https://www.pcgamer.com/amd-moores-law-aint-dead-its-just-a-...

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/newer-chips-are-r...

This is actually the precise leap that Jensen made that internet commentators pooh-pooh'd: he has always understood the impact that Moore's Law has on his business, he is only there to find efficient ways to shovel out the transistors that TSMC mines for him. And if the treadmill of free transistors stops (or slows to a crawl) then where do the product gains come from? It has to be software, and accelerators, and other stuff. DLSS, for example. That's another leap where he was 10+ years ahead of the public, and was in a position of having to tell people what they wanted, because they didn't know it themselves yet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn1EsFe7snQ&t=1034s