cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/54411557
A chip oversupply may have pushed Nvidia to manufacture its own demand
The AI boom has been widely blamed for GPU prices spinning out of control over the past year. Following Jensen Huang’s resignation from Nvidia, new information suggests that this was the goal of the former CEO’s business strategy, which has long drawn accusations of circular financing.
A recent Wall Street Journal profile of Nvidia interim CEO Colette Kress has shed more light on how Nvidia controversially financed its own customers to drive the AI boom. According to the report, the company pushed for more deals in mid-to-late 2026 to keep its GPU prices high amid an oversupply of TSMC wafers.
Since at least last year, Nvidia has been accused of prolonging the AI boom by supporting the companies that buy its chips. Founder and former CEO Jensen Huang, along with then-CFO Kress, even went so far as to defend the company against comparisons to Enron, which used similar tactics to illegally obscure its debt before its 2001 collapse.
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Wait. So this is why I can’t afford a new gaming GPU?
Prison
Also for boards of financial institutions lending to this without doing due diligence. Arguably they’re worse because they should bear responsibility for investors savings, and also to avoid bank runs and triggering financial panic. Hopefully it’s mostly equity financing and the investors will get nowt; but banking systems are so complex I think it’s quite hard to follow the source of funds.
Buy the new one though
Please let it collapse.
Also, please let him get punished in Singapore the way they punish drug smugglers. Public floggings and whatnot.
Singapore and punishing the wealthy? Good joke.
At a Berlin conference, the former CEO told major clients a story about a busy Japanese soup vendor who refused to give him a second serving after he had waited in a long line, saying the vendor had too many customers and not enough soup. Huang used the story to highlight the value of maintaining a diverse customer base and keeping prices high, suggesting that Nvidia’s circular financing strategy inflated GPU prices by creating the perception of high demand.
I hear that story and feel like the reason each consumer could.only buy one, was if one person bought them all, he couldn’t maintain a consumer base and would be at the whim of his big buyers demands…
The lesson should have been to prioritize amount of customers over a few large contracts that could disappear overnight.
Gee, when I price fix a nation, I have to go to bed without supper.
And if you price fix the whole world you’re grounded for a week I suppose?
And they take away my phone, yea.
guess i’m switching to AMD…until whatever bullshit skeletons in their closet come to light. then i guess i’ll have to find a new pastime
Fun fact - the CEO of AMD is Jensen Huang’s first cousin.
what the fuck
Intel GPUs have splendid drivers under Linux!
If Intel doesn’t tickle your fancy, Vortex looks promising.
Intel GPUs are quite weak last time I checked them. AMD seems a better option if one ignores “we are a data center first” company crap.
If this demand manufactoring is enough for you to switch sides, I have a hard time seeing AMD being a better choice. 🤷♂️
They (AMD**) are also involved in the same circular financing. I’m not sure what people in this comment section are talking about, and I think most of them don’t know either. None of this is new information or necessarily illegal.
It’s completely legitimate to have concerns about the circular financing, there’s been lots of talk about that for over a year now, but I’m not sure why people are saying it’s fraud suddenly
Look up the term channel stuffing. That’s the part that can be accused of fraud under certain conditions and is related but separate from the circular financing situation. There was a better article around here a few days ago that outlined it a bit more than this one.
The former CEO basically admitted to channel stuffing but whether this scenario meets the bar for fraud is up to the courts.
Investing in your future customers isn’t what channel stuffing is. Channel stuffing would be like if Microsoft ordered 200 GPUs, and Nvidia generated an invoice for and sent them 400 GPUs instead, inflating its sales.
Fraud is totally possible, but there is no evidence of it mentioned anywhere in this article or any others, just a lot of vague gesticulating to information that’s been common knowledge for a long time and pretending it’s new.
Here is a video of the Plain Bagel, a popular finance YouTuber, talking about all of this a year ago: https://youtu.be/fIcWfHikAOo
Note that he also agrees that the investing patterns are unsustainable, but there’s been no evidence so far of fraud, or that the bubble is gonna pop any day now. I really think these articles are just preying on people who want to hope things will return to normal soon.
This is such a dumb take.
“Brick maker found to keep brick prices artificially high through investing in speciality brick construction firms which increase demands for their bricks.”
This is such a dumb take.
Yes, your take is dumb indeed.
No ‘takes’ are being made tho?
You made an analogy but made no attempt to explain why in your analogy the behaviour wouldn’t also be rotten.
Your analogy also needs to be “brick maker with near monopoly…”
