• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    Debt, both on-the-books and anticipated.

    Intel’s investments in the Titanium chipset have effectively dead-ended. They can’t get below 7nm efficiently. Meanwhile, you’ve got companies in Taiwan, Korea, China, and Japan breaking into the 3nm and 2nm scales. To catch up, they’re looking at hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars in technical debt.

    Yes, they can keep churning out existing processors at huge profits in the moment. But the face value of these processors plummets with every new step in Moore’s Law. This amounts to asset depreciation, which means Intel’s value is heavily overstated on the basis of asset cost alone.

    I won’t argue that NVIDIA is overvalued. But I think the degree to which they are overvalued is often misattributed to speculation and avoids the real specter haunting the company… competition. NVIDIA’s market dominance and the escalating demand for their technology means the sky really should be the limit for their growth. Demand for AI processing is at the forefront of these expectations. But a rival manufacturer capable of cutting into demand for their units would dramatically undermine their profitability.

    Its the same with firms like Microsoft and Facebook and Boeing. So much of their dominance is predicated on the theory that people will never leave these walled gardens and their margins being enormous purely because they controlled a critical commodity/patch of technical real estate.

    There was - incidentally - another enormous company that seemed to have the market cornered in its industry and got complacent with its R&D and long-term investment strategies… Intel.