Nvidia are going to spend $500 billion on increasing their carbon footprint.
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NVIDIA has a speedrun of the problem that a lot of companies had.
They started making a fairly niche product: a 3D accelerator for gaming. This was something that was a fairly limited (but high margin) market. They were able to take a lot of the graphics workstation market because their products were not quite as good but a lot cheaper than existing players there, but that had always been a tiny market.
They were lucky because the costs were coming down and the time that they entered the market was about the time it was possible to create something that was just about cheap enough to go from the gamer market that 3dfx targeted to the wider every-computer-needs-one market.
That gave them a load of early growth. The market likes growth.
Then they released programmable shaders and the entire GPGPU movement started. That let them sell parallel compute engines that operated on regular data to a load of places that didn't care about graphics. Not the highest volume, but a larger market than 3D workstations ever were and similar margins.
That gave them more growth. The market likes growth.
When they were starting to reach market saturation, they released cards that were good at cryptocurrency 'mining'. Suddenly there was a path that let people buy NVIDIA GPUs and use them to create money (or, at least, things people were willing to exchange for money).
And that gave them more growth, albeit driven by an obvious bubble. The market likes growth.
But that bubble was going to burst. Augmented reality looked like a possible replacement but the people in that space were mostly building their own low-power chips (and it failed to take off). They needed a new bubble. Fortunately, someone combined the knowledge that you could represent layers in feed-forward neural networks as matrixes and then run them very quickly on a machine that was good at doing independent floating-point operations over regular data structures. And so you could run large feed-forward neural networks on GPUs. Bubble opportunity! So they hyped the hell out of that new use case.
And that led to a load of new orders. And that's growth! The market likes growth.
Unfortunately, none of their customers were actually making money from the GPUs used for running these neural networks. Unlike the previous bubble (where people were making money, though mostly from things that looked a lot like scams), this one needed to be fuelled by throwing more capital in. So they started doing all sorts of exciting deals with this kind of structure:
- NVIDIA invests in a company, marking it down as capital expenditure.
- The company turns around and promises to spend all of the money on NVIDIA GPUs.
- NVIDIA reports that money as revenue.
- The market sees increased revenue and knows that the value of a company is some multiple of its revenue, so the value of NVDA increases by more than the cost of the initial investment.
- NVIDIA sells enough shares to cover the investment.
Apparently this is legal, but it absolutely shouldn't be. But each new investment loop like this generates more customers, which signals growth, and the market loves growth.
The systemic problem is that the stock market redirects capital to things that have the potential for growth and this gives a huge incentive for any company to demonstrate growth. A company that has saturated its market and is consistently producing good products is less attractive to investors than one that is in a growing area. If you are in a market that is saturated, you need to either keep entering new markets (which, again, should be triggering antitrust laws because cross subsidies are illegal and about the only way you can successfully do this) or provide some rationale to the stock market of why your saturated market can grow.
But I don't think that absolves NVIDIA. They have been doing a lot of deeply unethical things and I hope a future SEC (or European regulators, once they realise Trump's SEC is a waste of space) will determine that they were illegal. And I will absolutely remember the people who were celebrating Huang while he was doing all of this.
@david_chisnall just to say how much I appreciate that you are here David, and consistently adding depth to the story of compute and to my superficial understanding of it. Thank you
- NVIDIA invests in a company, marking it down as capital expenditure.
-
Nvidia are going to spend $500 billion on increasing their carbon footprint.
For context, the UN have estimated that it would cost $93 billion per year to end world hunger.
Anyway, hope you're all enjoying the heat wave.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c78gr0jv0mdo
#NVidia #ClimateCollapse #ClimateChange #ClimateCatastrophe #ClimateEmergency
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@david_chisnall @wolf480pl @statsguy OK, you're wasting your time here. Capitalism is the problem, no matter how you try to justify it. If there were any chance of the structural problems being solved by regulation (voluntary or otherwise), then global scandals like the Panama and Paradise papers would have had that effect. Regulators and politicians are so invested in or dependent on the status quo that it's futile to mess around at the margins of this broken system.
@MiaMarkTwo I think the predicament is much deeper than capitalism. For example, https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/117058923656383560 from Olivier Hamant is intriguing.
I return frequently to Prof Tim Garrett’s observation that inequality is inherent in high energy systems.
We can for sure manage inequity and scamming better than we do, but I feel like the scale of non-regenerative throughput (in a debt structure that mandates more throughput) has its own inevitabile dynamics to it
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NVIDIA has a speedrun of the problem that a lot of companies had.
They started making a fairly niche product: a 3D accelerator for gaming. This was something that was a fairly limited (but high margin) market. They were able to take a lot of the graphics workstation market because their products were not quite as good but a lot cheaper than existing players there, but that had always been a tiny market.
They were lucky because the costs were coming down and the time that they entered the market was about the time it was possible to create something that was just about cheap enough to go from the gamer market that 3dfx targeted to the wider every-computer-needs-one market.
That gave them a load of early growth. The market likes growth.
Then they released programmable shaders and the entire GPGPU movement started. That let them sell parallel compute engines that operated on regular data to a load of places that didn't care about graphics. Not the highest volume, but a larger market than 3D workstations ever were and similar margins.
That gave them more growth. The market likes growth.
When they were starting to reach market saturation, they released cards that were good at cryptocurrency 'mining'. Suddenly there was a path that let people buy NVIDIA GPUs and use them to create money (or, at least, things people were willing to exchange for money).
And that gave them more growth, albeit driven by an obvious bubble. The market likes growth.
But that bubble was going to burst. Augmented reality looked like a possible replacement but the people in that space were mostly building their own low-power chips (and it failed to take off). They needed a new bubble. Fortunately, someone combined the knowledge that you could represent layers in feed-forward neural networks as matrixes and then run them very quickly on a machine that was good at doing independent floating-point operations over regular data structures. And so you could run large feed-forward neural networks on GPUs. Bubble opportunity! So they hyped the hell out of that new use case.
And that led to a load of new orders. And that's growth! The market likes growth.
Unfortunately, none of their customers were actually making money from the GPUs used for running these neural networks. Unlike the previous bubble (where people were making money, though mostly from things that looked a lot like scams), this one needed to be fuelled by throwing more capital in. So they started doing all sorts of exciting deals with this kind of structure:
- NVIDIA invests in a company, marking it down as capital expenditure.
- The company turns around and promises to spend all of the money on NVIDIA GPUs.
- NVIDIA reports that money as revenue.
- The market sees increased revenue and knows that the value of a company is some multiple of its revenue, so the value of NVDA increases by more than the cost of the initial investment.
- NVIDIA sells enough shares to cover the investment.
Apparently this is legal, but it absolutely shouldn't be. But each new investment loop like this generates more customers, which signals growth, and the market loves growth.
The systemic problem is that the stock market redirects capital to things that have the potential for growth and this gives a huge incentive for any company to demonstrate growth. A company that has saturated its market and is consistently producing good products is less attractive to investors than one that is in a growing area. If you are in a market that is saturated, you need to either keep entering new markets (which, again, should be triggering antitrust laws because cross subsidies are illegal and about the only way you can successfully do this) or provide some rationale to the stock market of why your saturated market can grow.
But I don't think that absolves NVIDIA. They have been doing a lot of deeply unethical things and I hope a future SEC (or European regulators, once they realise Trump's SEC is a waste of space) will determine that they were illegal. And I will absolutely remember the people who were celebrating Huang while he was doing all of this.
@david_chisnall @MiaMarkTwo @statsguy
Part of the problem is that directors are often rewarded for share price growth (usually with share options issued at the current price, but sometimes explicitly in their contract too). The whole world is obsessed with ’growth’, though there are plenty of profitable steady-state companies we never hear about. - NVIDIA invests in a company, marking it down as capital expenditure.
-
Nvidia are going to spend $500 billion on increasing their carbon footprint.
For context, the UN have estimated that it would cost $93 billion per year to end world hunger.
Anyway, hope you're all enjoying the heat wave.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c78gr0jv0mdo
#NVidia #ClimateCollapse #ClimateChange #ClimateCatastrophe #ClimateEmergency
@statsguy @AdeptVeritatis
This is a regulatory failure, and that is a governmental failure. -
@david_chisnall just to say how much I appreciate that you are here David, and consistently adding depth to the story of compute and to my superficial understanding of it. Thank you
@urlyman @david_chisnall @MiaMarkTwo @statsguy Same. Thank you, David @david_chisnall , for sharing your knowledge.
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@thegarbagebird Absolutely. Way too few people realise that
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Nvidia are going to spend $500 billion on increasing their carbon footprint.
For context, the UN have estimated that it would cost $93 billion per year to end world hunger.
Anyway, hope you're all enjoying the heat wave.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c78gr0jv0mdo
#NVidia #ClimateCollapse #ClimateChange #ClimateCatastrophe #ClimateEmergency
They are completely out of control and crazy, they simply don't care if the world goes on fire. They bet everything, including our lifes, on AI.
This is not going to end, because they will loose their bet.
When a man thinks he can become some sort of God, things turn into a disaster usually....
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Nvidia are going to spend $500 billion on increasing their carbon footprint.
For context, the UN have estimated that it would cost $93 billion per year to end world hunger.
Anyway, hope you're all enjoying the heat wave.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c78gr0jv0mdo
#NVidia #ClimateCollapse #ClimateChange #ClimateCatastrophe #ClimateEmergency
@statsguy Jensen, buddy - Thanks for nerdsplaining "compute" to everyone but it's not a resource, and you kinda forgot that NO ONE else is making money on this, so eventually neither will you. Compute actually needs huge water and electricity hungry complexes that nobody wants near them and take years to build. Enjoy the race to the bubble popping.
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Nvidia are going to spend $500 billion on increasing their carbon footprint.
For context, the UN have estimated that it would cost $93 billion per year to end world hunger.
Anyway, hope you're all enjoying the heat wave.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c78gr0jv0mdo
#NVidia #ClimateCollapse #ClimateChange #ClimateCatastrophe #ClimateEmergency
@statsguy@mas.to May they all go bankrupt.
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Nvidia are going to spend $500 billion on increasing their carbon footprint.
For context, the UN have estimated that it would cost $93 billion per year to end world hunger.
Anyway, hope you're all enjoying the heat wave.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c78gr0jv0mdo
#NVidia #ClimateCollapse #ClimateChange #ClimateCatastrophe #ClimateEmergency
@statsguy Just yesterday I found by some napkin math that $500B is about 20% of the total cost of solving climate change through building passive radiative cooling panels. We could do it. Nvidia alone could do it twice over. The top 10 companies could completely make this problem disappear in a couple of years by paying something close to their fair tax rate. But they aren't doing any of it.
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Nvidia are going to spend $500 billion on increasing their carbon footprint.
For context, the UN have estimated that it would cost $93 billion per year to end world hunger.
Anyway, hope you're all enjoying the heat wave.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c78gr0jv0mdo
#NVidia #ClimateCollapse #ClimateChange #ClimateCatastrophe #ClimateEmergency
@statsguy please do not be offended: "Nvidia are going" should be 'Nvidia *is*...' a company is singular
"the UN have.." --> 'the UN *has*..'
again, singular (an entity). -
Nvidia are going to spend $500 billion on increasing their carbon footprint.
For context, the UN have estimated that it would cost $93 billion per year to end world hunger.
Anyway, hope you're all enjoying the heat wave.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c78gr0jv0mdo
#NVidia #ClimateCollapse #ClimateChange #ClimateCatastrophe #ClimateEmergency
Money never was and is the problem. People are.
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