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Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

1018 points by stycznik 1y ago

NL807 1y ago
Intel dead.
smugma 1y ago
Give up 0.1% of shares to get 5% of Intel. Seems to be an easy bet, if for no other reason than to make the US Government (Trump) happy. Trump gets to tout his +30% return on investment.
varshithr 1y ago
Grandma smiling from heaven
monkeydust 1y ago
Precursor to full acquisition perhaps...also maybe Jensen play to Trump a bit in this.
- amo1111 1y ago
  If there’s a time to do it, now would be the time with the current administration looking at all the regulatory blowback.
- hvb2 1y ago
  It would be 100% Trump to have Nvidia buy Intel and then announce how good of an investment decision he made by buying a slice of intel. USA, where the federal government is picking winners and losers by making risky stock bets with public money.
  - delfinom 1y ago
    Not even the government at this point. The oligarchs are now in full control of the US and are dividing up their kingdoms. The plans for glulags for detractors are also being placed.
    - geertj 1y ago
      > The plans for glulags for detractors are also being placed. This needlessly divisive and devoid of any factual basis. No gulags will exist and you know it.
      - mschuster91 1y ago
        > This needlessly divisive and devoid of any factual basis. No gulags will exist and you know it. What about "Alligator Alcatraz", that has been called "concentration camp" [1] (so comparable with a gulag), or where the Korean detainees from the raid on the Hyundai/LG plant ended up, alleging utterly horrible conditions [2]? And there's bound to be more places like the latter, that was most likely just the tip of the iceberg and we only know about the conditions there because the South Korean government raised a huge stink and got the workers out of there. Okay, Alcatraz 2.0 did get suspended in August to my knowledge, but that's only temporary. It's bound to get the legal issues cleaned up and then be re-opened - or the case makes its way through to the Supreme Court with the same result to be expected. [1] https://newrepublic.com/article/197508/alligator-alcatraz-trump-concentration-camp https://newrepublic.com/article/197508/alligator-alcatraz-tr... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c07v1j98ydvo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c07v1j98ydvo
        PKop 1y ago
        Those people aren't American citizens, the comparison doesn't fit.
        TheCoelacanth 1y ago
        They didn't get due process, so there's no way to be sure that American citizens aren't getting sent there.
- Panzer04 1y ago
  If you wanted to acquire Intel you'd do it now. Maybe Intel's future products are garbage and they do worse - but the upside seems pretty high otherwise. This seems like a bit of a firesale price to acquire an advanced fab and CPU maker. Sure, it's Intel and they haven't been doing great, but companies with solid reliable outlooks don't trade this cheaply. Ofc I would kind of hope/expect antitrust to object given that Intel makes both GPUs and CPUs, and Nvidia is/has dipped their toes into CPU production as well.
  - fidotron 1y ago
    > If you wanted to acquire Intel you'd do it now. Intel still has to go through a lot of reorg (i.e. massive cuts) to get to a happy place, and this is what their succession of CEOs have been procrastinating over.
    - baq 1y ago
      Judging by my linkedin feed the 'a lot of reorg' is underway.
      - fidotron 1y ago
        Bluntly, Intel has corporate cancer, and it requires removing the actual cancers, not a sort of 20% haircut.
    - Panzer04 1y ago
      I recall reading a reddit comment (resounding source, I know) that claimed the reason Intel's e-cores are crushing it is because they actually synthesise them, while the P-cores are a bunch of bespoke circuits bodged together. One wonders just how bad things must have been internally for that to be the state of one of their core IPs in this day and age...
beameup10 1y ago
Wasn't Nvidia working on their own CPU design? Will they drop that?
- JonChesterfield 1y ago
  They're shipping arm derived cpus and have been for years.
  - vFunct 1y ago
    They also use RISC-V cores throughout their products
    - yvdriess 1y ago
      And tilera in their DPUs
amo1111 1y ago
This has been an interesting 1.5 months for Intel on all fronts. I wonder how long this deal was in the making, since the timing is impeccable, looking at the current administration's involvement with Intel.
pjmlp 1y ago
So AMD got ATI, and now NVidia gets Intel.
- DiskoHexyl 1y ago
  Difference is, AMD wasn't a competitor for ATi. One mostly built CPU's, while another- GPUs. These two, on the other hand, are competing in several major product categories. Overall, not a good look
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    I doubt we would be seeing Dell selling NVidia ARM CPUs anytime soon. However I do imagine Intel GPUs, that were never great to start with, might be doomed, long term. Also another possibility would be, there goes One API, which I doubt many people would care about, given how many rebrands SYSCL already went through.
  - roboror 1y ago
    >One mostly built CPU's, while another- GPUs. I mean that also applies to Intel and Nvidia. Intel does make GPUs but their market impact is basically zero.
- gpderetta 1y ago
  Fitting. Then you used to bolt a GPU to a computer. These days you bolt a computer to a GPU.
ur-whale 1y ago
5B is a fairly tiny stake (Intel's market cap is around 120B), other than the "we're now working together" signal, why is this news?
- nabla9 1y ago
  In terms of voting stock, they become the biggest owner after US Commerce Department. As customer they get better access to Intel Foundry and can offload some capacity from TSMC.
  - voxadam 1y ago
    > In terms of voting stock, they become the biggest owner after US Commerce Department. As I understand it the government's shares are non-voting.
    - snake42 1y ago
      The U.S. government won’t have a seat on the board and agreed to vote with Intel’s board on matters requiring shareholder approval “with limited exceptions.”
- Panzer04 1y ago
  tbf, If I were Nvidia and antitrust wasn't an issue I'd be tempted to buy the whole thing. Intel has a market cap just 2.5% of NVDA, so you could give away just 2.5% of your stock to buy the entirety of Intel. It's bonkers.
  - amalcon 1y ago
    There are two scenarios here. In one, the AI bubble bursts (so Nvidia is overpriced now) and almost any value stock deal is good for them. In the other, it doesn't, and this gives them a limited hedge against problems with their most critical strategic partner (TSMC). It looks like a good deal either way and in any amount. But of course I am no expert.
joz1-k 1y ago
About 16 years ago, Intel was considered an ugly monopoly that Nvidia didn't like [0]. It seems as if they have switched sides now. [0]: <https://www.fudzilla.com/6882-nvidia-continues-comic-campaign-against-intel https://www.fudzilla.com/6882-nvidia-continues-comic-campaig...>
- DrStartup 1y ago
  they need domestic chip capabilities
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
gorgoiler 1y ago
> It is unclear if Intel will issue new stock for Nvidia to purchase Erm, a rather important point to bury down the story. The fiest question on anyone’s lips will be is this $5bn to build new chip technology, or $5bn for employees to spend on yachts?
- Mistletoe 1y ago
  It’s the most important part of the story. It’s so gross that companies can just dilute and create stock out of thin air like this. Why hold stock in Intel if the only people that ever buy the real stock and create buy pressure are the plebs? Here is the previous time… > Intel stock experienced dilution because the U.S. government converted CHIPS Act grants into an equity stake, acquiring a significant ownership percentage at a discounted price, which increased the total number of outstanding shares and reduced existing shareholders' ownership percentage, according to The Motley Fool and Investing.com. This led to roughly 11% dilution for existing shareholders
  - geertj 1y ago
    > It’s so gross that companies can just dilute and create stock out of thin air like this. Intel is up 30% pre market on this news so I think the existing shareholders will be fine.
    - 93po 1y ago
      i stole $100 from you, but you later won a scratch off for $300, so my stealing was ok
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    - Mistletoe 1y ago
      And it is already trending down today, I wonder how long it will stay up and how long it will take the average investor to figure out NVDA isn't buying INTC on the open market and driving up the price.
sho_hn 1y ago
nVidia has also been licensing their GPU IP to MediaTek recently, who are working on a 2nd generation of a SoC that combines their ARM cores with nVidia GPUs now, catering to e.g. the automotive market. Looks like using GPU IP to take over other brands' product lines is now officially an nVidia strategy. I guess the obvious worry here is whether Intel will continue development of their own dGPUs, which have a lovely open driver stack.
- Panzer04 1y ago
  Unless Nvidia outright absorbs intel I think Intel would have to be kind of crazy to stop developing GPUs. So long as the AI craze is hanging in there it feels like having that expertise and IP is going to have high potential upside.
  - sho_hn 1y ago
    I'd agree, but Intel has also halted dGPU development efforts before, cf. the canned Larrabee project. Which was more troubled on the technology side however.
    - ACCount37 1y ago
      Yeah, Larrabee was nowhere near what they have now with Intel Arc. Would be foolish to throw that away now that they're finally getting closer to "a product someone may want to buy" with things like B50 and B60.
- KeplerBoy 1y ago
  Seems Nvidia needs an alternative to MediaTek or wants to pressure MediaTek given the announcement of x86 Intel/Nvidia SoCs and the delay of DGX Spark, GB10 and N1X. They wanted to launch DGX Spark early summer and it's nowhere to be seen, while strix halo is shipping in over 30+ SKUs from all major manufacturers.
bobajeff 1y ago
What's the significance of $5B of stock? Does that mean controlling share in Intel?
- iamacyborg 1y ago
  I would assume not given their market cap.
- kypro 1y ago
  No, but it's still a big stake from the largest player in semis. You wouldn't expect a move like that if they didn't see an opportunity there.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
    Seems like when Microsoft invested in Apple to keep Apple from going out of business and turning Microsoft into a potential Monopoly.
- Ozarkian 1y ago
  It's written in the article that the $5B represents about 5% of Intel stock outstanding.
- zeograd 1y ago
  Article mentions it amounts to ~5% ownership
- mr_toad 1y ago
  It’s a corporate engagement ring.
fidotron 1y ago
Possibly more curious than the investment: > Nvidia will also have Intel build custom x86 data center CPUs for its AI products for hyperscale and enterprise customers. Hell has frozen over at Intel. Actually listening to people that want to buy your stuff, whatever next? Presumably someone over there doesn't want the AI wave to turn into a repeat of their famous success with mobile. In the event Intel ever do get US based fabrication semi competitive again (and the national security motivation for doing so is intense) nVidia will likely have to be a major customer, so this does make sense. I remain doubtful that Intel can pull it off, and it will have to come from someone else.
- baq 1y ago
  If you were a big enough customer you could get a SKU for you, too. E.g. hyperscalers have Xeons which are not available for any other customers for any price.
  - fidotron 1y ago
    But what they've completely resisted so far is any non trivial modification. They turned down Acorn about the 286, which led to Acorn creating the Arm, they have turned down various console makers, they turned down Apple on the iPhone, and so on. In all cases they thought the opportunities were beneath them. Intel has always been too much about what they want to sell you, not what you need. That worked for them when the two aligned over backwards compat. Clearly the threat of an Arm or RISC-V finding itself fused to a GPU running AI inference workloads has woken someone up, at last.
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      > they have turned down various console makers The problem is, console manufacturers know precisely how much of their product they anticipate to sell, and it's usually a lot. The PlayStation 5 is 80 million units so far. And at that scale, the console manufacturers want to squeeze every vendor as hard as they can... and Intel didn't see the need to engage in a bidding war with AMD that would have given them a sizable revenue but very little profit margin compared to selling Xeon CPUs to hyperscalers where Intel has much more leverage to command higher prices and thus higher margins. > they turned down Apple on the iPhone Intel just was (and frankly, still is) unable to compete on the power envelope with ARM, that's why you never saw x86 take off on Android as well despite quite a few attempts at it. Apple only chose to go for Intel with its MacBook line as PowerPC was practically dead and offered no way to extract more performance, and they dropped Intel as soon as their own CPUs were competitive. To get Intel CPUs to the same level of power efficiency that M-series CPUs have would require a full rework of the entire CPU infrastructure and external stack, that would require money that even Intel at its best frankly did not have. And getting x86 to be power effective enough for a phone? Just forget it. > Clearly the threat of an Arm or RISC-V finding itself fused to a GPU running AI inference workloads has woken someone up, at last. Actually, that is surprising for me as well. NVIDIA's Tegra should easily be powerful enough to run the OS for training or inference workload. If I were to guess, NVIDIA wants to avoid getting caught too hard on the "selling AI shovels" train.
jfdi 1y ago
Great news for all involved. It also would seem to validate Apple’s unified architecture for inference, and imply AMD is getting close…
- kllrnohj 1y ago
  You mean AMD's unified architecture. They were a founder of the HSA Foundation that drove innovation in this space complete with Linux kernel investments and unified compute SDKs, and they had the first shipping hardware support.
  - xbar 1y ago
    This is a strong take. AMD's actual commitment to open innovation over the past ~20 years has been game changing in a lot of segments. It is the aspect of AMD that makes it so much more appealing than intel from a hacker/consumer perspective.
JonChesterfield 1y ago
I can think of _nothing_ with a better shot at unseating nvidia than a merger with intel. Fingers crossed for ever closer union between the two.
- ericmay 1y ago
  They aren’t merging - this is Nvidia ensuring their tech is in Intel chips.
  - JonChesterfield 1y ago
    Yes indeed. It's still a step in that direction that opens up a bunch of communication channels between the execs of the two companies. Things move slowly.
  - rm445 1y ago
    Might rather see it the other way around - Nvidia getting license to create products with x86(_64) CPUs integrated in the silicon. Nvidia are the big boy in this transaction and they'll get what they want out of it. But I can see the attraction for Intel.
    - noncoml 1y ago
      I don't think they can, as AFAIK the agreement for x86_64 is that Intel and AMD cannot change hands. AMD will surely fight this tooth and nail in the courts But with the state of the courts today... who knows..
- imiric 1y ago
  You can't be serious. Intel was well on its way to be a considerable threat to NVIDIA with their Arc line of GPUs, which are getting better and cheaper with each generation. Perhaps not in the enterprise and AI markets yet, but certainly on the consumer side. This news muddies this approach, and I see it as a misstep for both Intel and for consumers. Intel is only helping NVIDIA, which puts them further away from unseating them than they were before. Competition is always a net positive for consumers, while mergers are always a net negative. This news will only benefit shareholders of both companies, and Intel shareholders only in the short-term. In the long-term, it's making NVIDIA more powerful.
qzw 1y ago
Remember when Microsoft invested in Apple when Apple was down in the dumps? This is giving similar vibes. That deal was arguably what saved Apple near its nadir. I’m not a fan of Intel’s past monopolistic practices, but for the sake of sustaining competition in the CPU/GPU market, I hope this deal works out for them even half as well as the MS deal did for Apple.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
  All they need now is a CEO like Steve Jobs…
  - __turbobrew__ 1y ago
    Jensen moves to intel …
- tremon 1y ago
  I don't think that's an apt comparison, given that Microsoft and Apple were more direct competitors than Intel and Nvidia; the latter have a more symbiotic relationship. I think the rationale is closer to the competitor of my competitor is my friend -- they face two threats by AMD growing larger in the CPU market: - a bigger R&D budget for their main competitor in the GPU market - since Nvidia doesn't have their own CPUs, they risk becoming more dependent on their main competitor for total system performance.
  - readams 1y ago
    Here's Nvidia's CPUs, which are increasingly a required part of their data center offerings: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/grace-cpu/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/grace-cpu/
    - thyristan 1y ago
      Required in that Nvidia would like to sell them to you. But customers seem to be hesitant and prefer x86-based DGX and similar systems. At least from what I've heard and seen.
Sol- 1y ago
Nowadays I always wonder to what extent such deals are actually driven by market considerations and to what extent it's catering to the Trump administration. Token investments into this state enterprise named Intel seems to be a practical way to cater goodwill with the autocrats.
DarkmSparks 1y ago
After the arm buyout fell through, I guess this is the next best thing. Plus a good deal for nvidia since Intel is pretty desperate at this point.
scrlk 1y ago
> For personal computing, Intel will build and offer to the market x86 system-on-chips (SOCs) that integrate NVIDIA RTX GPU chiplets. These new x86 RTX SOCs will power a wide range of PCs that demand integration of world-class CPUs and GPUs. https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1750/nvidia-and-intel-to-develop-ai-infrastructure-and-personal https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1750/... What’s old is new again: back in 2017, Intel tried something similar with AMD (Kaby Lake-G). They paired a Kaby Lake CPU with a Vega GPU and HBM, but the product flopped: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-discontinue-kaby-lake-g-amd-graphics,40577.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-discontinue-kaby-lak...
- ddalex 1y ago
  That was targeted at supporting more tightly integrated and performant Macbooks .... it flopped because Apple came up with M1, not because it was bad per se.
  - intvocoder 1y ago
    apple never shipped a product with that, but it made for an excellent hackintosh
    - ddalex 1y ago
      Exactly
  - JonChesterfield 1y ago
    The ryzen APUs had a rocky start but are properly good now, the concept is sound
- linuxftw 1y ago
  To me, this just validates what AMD has been doing for over a decade. Integrated GPUs for personal computing are the way forward.
- herodoturtle 1y ago
jgalt212 1y ago
INTC is strategically important company. They won't be allowed to fail. Of course, that doesn't mean the stock is a good investment. During the GFC, all the equity holders were wiped out all the bond holders got all their money back. Figure that one out.
- baq 1y ago
  That's quite literally why bonds are bonds and equity is equity...
  - jgalt212 1y ago
    Perhaps, but you do understand that the probability of every tranche regardless of seniority getting paid in full and the equity getting nothing is zero. It's mathematically impossible to pin the waterfall like this.
    - baq 1y ago
      With good enough lawyers mathematically impossible is practically relative. Assume the game is rigged, play accordingly. If it doesn't make sense, it makes sense.
boxerab 1y ago
The enemy of my enemy is my friend
BoredPositron 1y ago
So that's probably it for the dedicated Intel GPUs. :/
whycome 1y ago
Also, the US Govt bought $8.9B in stock last month I guess https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1748/intel-and-trump-administration-reach-historic-agreement-to https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1748/...
- ecocentrik 1y ago
  Correction: Renegotiated a prior loan as a $8.9B stock purchase.
  - phkahler 1y ago
    Does that mean Intel doesn't ever have to pay it back?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - KeplerBoy 1y ago
      It means Intel already paid it back. The dilution hurt all other owners.
      - hopelite 1y ago
        That is arguable. Regardless of everything else, currently Intel stock is up about 50% from recent averages. If investors were so hurt, they really should be selling right now, and there seems to be reason to do so because Intel's troubles have not gone away with this Nvidia stake that does not touch Intel's rotten underbelly.
        KeplerBoy 1y ago
        Both statements can be true. Dilution hurts investors, but fresh cash and a strategic Nvidia partnership have huge potential upsides.
igtztorrero 1y ago
This is the first step that Nvidia takes to devour Intel.
seanalltogether 1y ago
It feels like the end is in sight for dedicated graphics chips in consumer devices. Phones, consoles, and now Apple silicon are proving that SoC designs with unified memory and focused thermals are a winning strategy for efficiency and speed. Nvidia may be happy enough to move the graphics strategy onto an SoC and keep discrete boards just for AI.
- esseph 1y ago
  Yet here I am just frothing for GPUs
- whatevaa 1y ago
  Yes for efficiency, not for speed.
JCM9 1y ago
Intel is a strategically important company for the United States. This smells like a token investment to appease the US government. Not saying it’s bad, but very much looks like that.
- adrr 1y ago
  Only the fab part is. Intel needs to separate the two. Maybe Nvidia, AMD, or Qualcomm can buy the the fab part.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    Why would either of these three be interested in buying a fab? The only other large player with its own fab is Samsung and Samsung has the same problem that Intel has, namedly a fab that is nowhere near close to TSMC. I agree that Intel would be better served to spin off its fab division, a potential buyer could be the US government for military and national security relevant projects.
    - adrr 1y ago
      Someone could be interested. It could also be Global Foundries. High risk big reward bet which the government is willing to help mitigate some of the risk with funding. They just need to separate business units.
      - DanielHB 1y ago
        Not an expert in the area, but I think the highest of the high-end chips is a big market, but not the biggest market as revenue for fabs. It is just the most profitable part of the market. Maybe this changed with the AI race but there are plenty of people buying older chips by the millions for all sorts of products.
        mandevil 1y ago
        The key for getting (financial) value out of fabs is their time after they are the overtaken by the next node. The ability to keep the order book full after you have a better node is what pays off the fab. So its all the other chips- the chips for cars, for low-power internet connected devices, etc. that make the fab profitable. That is where TSMC's ability to work with different customers enables them to extract value from a fab that pure-play CPU makers struggle with.
wheybags 1y ago
I wonder what this means for Intel's Arc lineup. Would be a bit crazy to have privileged access to a competitor's roadmap through just owning a chunk of them. I also have to admit I really hope they dont cancel them. A triopoly is at least better than a duopoly (or realistically, a monopoly as AMD's competitiveness in gpus is pretty questionable)
- vid 1y ago
  That's what I think of, along with favour from their new investment sibling, the US government. AMD doesn't want to be super competitive, they like their margins and being second choice in a hypetastic market. Even though Arc has very low adoption, it was making signs of doing scrappy things, like enabling two 24GB GPUs on one card from third party vendors, which got the hobby/upstart community pretty excited. Ultimately it's not a real market giving the people what they want via competition, it's all contrived by politics and the biggest players.
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  It probably kills any prospect of Intel releasing a market disrupter card that many were calling for - a 64GB or 92GB card with even middling performance for under $1k. It's pretty clear AMD and Nvidia are gatekeeping memory so they can iterate over time and protect their datacenter cards. Intel had a prime opportunity to blow this up.
- thescriptkiddie 1y ago
  imho the entire point of this for nvidia is to kill arc
  - rkomorn 1y ago
    Which is arguably kind of weird because where is it actually competing with NVIDIA? A hypothetical future, I guess? But also, does this amount of ownership even give them the ability to kill anything on Intel's roadmap without broad shareholder consensus (not that that's even how roadmaps are handled anyway)?
  - simne 1y ago
alex1138 1y ago
I know AMD used to be lacking but these days I guess they're probably the go-to on Linux because they share changes with the community I don't like the idea of using Intel given their lack of disclosure for Spectre/Meltdown and some of their practices (towards AMD)
Symmetry 1y ago
SemiAccruate reported that NVidia had been dipping its toes into manufacturing its products using Intel's fabs several months ago, I'd assume that that's related.
saejox 1y ago
I hope this isn't "Shut-up" money to end ARC gpu development. i have an A770, i am very happy with it.
- bilekas 1y ago
  It's absolutely not, the ARC line is not a threat in any way to nVidia, it's to get it's feet into the CPU market without the initial setup costs and research it would take to start from scratch. They will be dominating AMD now on both fronts if things go smoothly for them.
gdiamos 1y ago
best news i've heard in days
bilekas 1y ago
This really wasn't a surprise, nVidia has seemed to be itching for a meaningful entry to the CPU market and when intel's CEO started undoing all and any future investment in the company it was clear everything was being setup for a sell off. 5 Billion is just a start but this is a gift for nVidia to eventually squire intel.
- xbar 1y ago
  I think if Nvidia wanted to acquire Intel, they would acquire Intel. Intel has never been so cheap relative to the kinds of IP assets that Nvidia values and probably will not be ever again if this and other investments keep it afloat. Trump's FTC would not block. You write with proper case-sensitivity for their titles which suggests some historic knowledge of the two. They have been very close partners on CPU+GPU for decades. This investment is not fundamentally changing that. The current CEO is more like a CFO--cutting costs and eliminating waste. There are two exits from that: sell off, as you say, and re-investment in the products of most likely future profit. This could be a signal that the latter is the plan and that the competitive aspects of the nVidia-intel partnership will be sidelined for a while.
OrvalWintermute 1y ago
I'm taking this investment as a validation of the competitiveness of AMD's APUs & Apple's Silicon.
glimshe 1y ago
Are we getting a new iteration of sub-$200 mini PCs with an RTX chiplet?! That would be an amazing replacement for my N100!
tasuki 1y ago
> Nvidia announced that it will buy $5 billion in Intel common stock at $23.28 per share, representing a roughly 5% ownership stake in Intel. (Intel stock is now up 33% in premarket trading.) Why/how is INTC premarket up from $24.90 around 30% (to $32), when Nvidia is buying the stock at $23.28 ? Who is selling the stock? I suppose the Intel board decided this? Why did they sell under the current market price? Didn't the Intel board have fiduciary duty to get as good a price from Nvidia as possible? If Nvidia buying stock moves it up so much, it seems like a bad deal to sell the stock for so little.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 1y ago
  It's typical in these situations that the price per stock is negotiated, with current SP as a starting point. It's fairly unusual, I think, for the company selling stock to get a price significantly higher than market price. It's more typical that there's a slight discount. At least that's been the case for every stock I owned where dilution has occured. We also don't know yet when exactly this deal was negotiated and approved, so it's hard to actually say. Considering where INTC has been very recently(below $20), $23.28 seems very reasonable to me. The reason the stock surged up past $30 is the general market's reaction to the news, and subsequent buying pressure, not the stock transaction itself. It seems likely that once the exuberance cools down, the SP will pull back, where to I can't say. Somewhere between $25 and $30 would be my bet, but this is not financial advice, I'm just spitballing here.
belter 1y ago
NVIDIA is Jensen Huang life, and he is probably the best CEO in the USA. But he should be careful. Possible Shareholders lawsuits come with Discovery. NVIDIA sales to Coreweave for example, a company they have shares on is starting to look a lot like self-dealing. Also, since this Intel deal makes no sense for NVIDIA, a good observer would notice that lately, he seems to spend more time on Air Force One than with NVIDIA teams. The leak of any evidence, showing this was an investment ordered by the White House, will make his company hostage of future demands from the current corrupt administration. The timing is already incredibly suspicions. We will know for sure he become a hostage, if the next NVIDIA investment is on World Liberty Financial. "Anatomy of Two Giant Deals: The U.A.E. Got Chips. The Trump Team Got Crypto Riches." - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/us/politics/trump-uae-chips-witkoff-world-liberty.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/us/politics/trump-uae-chi...
- rhetocj23 1y ago
  The entire AI ecosystem that is being built out looks very suspect frankly..
- high_na_euv 1y ago
  Bullshit https://www.techpowerup.com/341137/nvidias-usd-5b-intel-investment-reveals-x86-gpu-nvlink-project https://www.techpowerup.com/341137/nvidias-usd-5b-intel-inve...
  - belter 1y ago
    In 2007 Jen-Hsun Huang had “No CPU plans; can’t add much value.” explained Nvidia “cannot add much value” in the CPU market and would focus on GPUs/chipsets. In 2009 he said a no to an Intel-compatible x86 CPU. In 2022 he said If x86 already exists, we’ll just use/partner: “One of the rules of our company is not to squander resources on something that already exists. If something already exists, for example, an x86 CPU, we’ll just use it… we’ll partner with them.” No. They were ordered to make this investment...
aenopix 1y ago
Capitalism, all at the hands of just a bunch of people.
juancn 1y ago
AMD is much stronger in unified memory architectures than Nvidia at this point. It kinda makes sense, with the AI push. I wonder what this means for the ARC line of GPUs?
HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
I'm guessing NVidia didn't do this by choice. Propping up Intel doesn't seem in their best interests, nor does it do their share holders any favors by diluting their rapid growth.
- danans 1y ago
  > I'm guessing NVidia didn't do this by choice. Propping up Intel doesn't seem in their best interests In a top-down oligarchy, their best interests are served by focusing on the desires of the great leader, in contrast to a competitive bottom-up market economy, where they would focus on the desires of customers and shareholders.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- nxobject 1y ago
  There's some case for self-interest – propping up another fab etc. – but I do wonder how much of it is USG. (The economic case for Intel integrating Nvidia silicon on-chip doesn't too much sense to me: there's no growth potential in commodity/consumer x86, and maybe they can shove their new integrated Nvidia in front of enterprise buyers, but I'd be a dubious re: ROI.)
- high_na_euv 1y ago
  Bullshit https://www.techpowerup.com/341137/nvidias-usd-5b-intel-investment-reveals-x86-gpu-nvlink-project https://www.techpowerup.com/341137/nvidias-usd-5b-intel-inve...
  - HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
    I'm not sure that "bullshit" is warranted... Sure it makes sense for NVidia to propagate proprietary interfaces like NVLink, as well as to do anything that helps drive their own GPU sales, but I'm not sure how you so confidently conclude from that that propping up Intel is in NVidia's best interest ?
littlecranky67 1y ago
This is a death blow to the Intel GPU+AI efforts and should not be allowed by the regulators. It is clear that Intel needs the downstream, low-cost GPU market segment to have a portfolio of AI chips based on chiplets, where most defective ones end up in the consumer grade GPUs based on manufacturing yield. NVidias interest is now for Intel not to enter either the GPU market, nor the AI market - which Intel was preparing for with its GPU efforts in recent years.
- dagmx 1y ago
  The regulators want this because it’s bolstering the last domestic owned fab. Any down the road repercussions be damned from their perspective.
- bogwog 1y ago
  Intel had an opportunity to differentiate themselves by offering more VRAM than Nvidia is willing to put in their consumer cards. It seemed like that was where Battlemage was going. But now, are they really going to undermine this partnership for that? Their GPUs probably aren't going to become a cash cow anytime soon, but this thing probably will. The mindset among American business leaders of the past two decades has been to prioritize short-term profits above all else.
  - pchangr 1y ago
    I remember when I was studying for an MBA.. a professor was talking about the intangible value of a brand .. and finance.. and how they would reflect on each other .. At some point we were decomposing the parts of a balance sheet and they asked if one could sell the goodwill to invest in something else .. and the answer was of course .. no… well.. America has proven us wrong .. the way you sell the goodwill is to basically enshittification.. you quickly burn all your brand reputation by lowering your costs with shittier products .. your goodwill goes to 0 but your income increases so stock go up .. the CEO gets a fat bonus for it .. even tho the company itself is destroyed .. then the CEO quickly abandons ship and does the same on their next company .. rinse and repeat… infinite money!
GeekyBear 1y ago
Could AMD argue that Intel's licence agreement for x86-64 is at risk since it requires that Intel (and AMD) may not change hands?
- high_na_euv 1y ago
  No, why?
654wak654 1y ago
I'm very pessimistic about this. Goodbye to those nice, budget-friendly intel GPUs. nGreedia is going to continue selling 8 gig cards to consumers forever.
LarsDu88 1y ago
Microsoft bailing out Apple vibes. This time around Nvidia should HOLDL the stock
swarnie 1y ago
Nana can stop spinning in her grave now, i think he just broke even....
jonas21 1y ago
NVDA stock is up 3.5% so far today, which is ~$150B, or slightly more than one Intel. $5B is pocket change in comparison.
- prewett 1y ago
  Except that Nvidia, Inc. doesn't own any of that NVDA stock, other people do, and they cannot access that money. Nvidia, Inc. owns net profit, which is orders of magnitude less than market cap. Last year's net profit was just under $73 billion. ($5 billion is still very affordable, too be sure).
  - jonas21 1y ago
    The board could issue more stock, which would dilute existing shareholders by about 0.1% and (in theory) cause the stock price to drop by 0.1%. But yeah, it's probably easier to just use cash on hand.
  - sekai 1y ago
    > Except that Nvidia, Inc. doesn't own any of that NVDA stock, other people do, and they cannot access that money. Nvidia, Inc. owns net profit, which is orders of magnitude less than market cap. Last year's net profit was just under $73 billion. ($5 billion is still very affordable, too be sure). Not all deals are made in cash, they can borrow money against their market share.
  - baq 1y ago
    I think you may have missed AMC and TSLA; for quite a while their best selling products and biggest revenue drivers were their stock. Reflexivity is a thing; NVDA could issue 5, 10 or 20B and I don't think the price would move very much in this market. (Note that could change tomorrow.)
lacoolj 1y ago
No way this doesn't get blocked by antitrust. This will make them way too large and Intel is already trying to sell off (US govt bought $10B couple weeks ago)
- wmf 1y ago
  The government is the one pushing this deal. They won't block it.
- y-c-o-m-b 1y ago
  > No way this doesn't get blocked by antitrust That action may cease to exist soon, especially after Vance is POTUS and the courts stacked with Peter Thiel loyalists that back his vision of anti-competition. Bet on it.
- nxobject 1y ago
  USG's far more interested in (scare quotes intentional) "AI dominance", and pushing American tech to fuse to do so – damn the consumer.
- micromacrofoot 1y ago
  who's running antitrust these days
ErigmolCt 1y ago
A weird kind of full-circle moment: Intel used to laugh off Nvidia, then tried Kaby Lake-G with AMD (RIP), and now they're handing over CPU real estate to the company that wiped the floor with their own GPU efforts
kittikitti 1y ago
Intel will soon say, "Et tu, Brute?"
evanjrowley 1y ago
Nvidia's stake in Intel could have terrible consequences. First, it is in Nvidia's interest to kill Intel's Arc graphics, and that would be very bad because it is the only thing brighing GPU prices down for consumers. Second, the death of Intel graphics / Arc would be extremely bad for Linux, because Intel's approach to GPU drivers is the best for compatibility, wheras Nvidia is actively hostile to drivers on Linux. Third, Intel is the only company marketing consumer-grade graphics virtualization (SR-IOV), and the loss of that would make Nvidia's enterprise chips the only game in town, meaning the average consumer gets less performance, less flexibility, and less security on their computers.
- matheusmoreira 1y ago
  I agree. As a Linux user who favors Intel hardware due to their Linux support, I gotta say the future looks bleak.
  - tliltocatl 1y ago
    Well, AMD isn't going away yet, and they do seem to have finally released the advantage of open-source drivers. But that's still bad very for competition and prices.
  - throwaway2037 1y ago
    > As a Linux user who favors Intel hardware due to their Linux support I'm confused here. Are you talking about Intel CPUs or GPUs? And does AMD not have excellent Linux support for their own CPUs and GPUs?
    - matheusmoreira 1y ago
      > Intel CPUs or GPUs Both. Also things like sound cards, network cards, peripherals in general. My happiness and stability while using Linux has been well correlated with the number of devices with Intel in the name. Every single device without Intel invariably becomes a major pain in my ass every single time. It's gotten to the point I assume it will just work if it's Intel. > And does AMD not have excellent Linux support for their own CPUs and GPUs? They're making a lot of progress but Intel is still years ahead of them. Earlier this year I was researching PC parts for a build and discovered AMD was still working on merging functionality like on die temperature sensors into the kernel. It makes me think I won't have a full feature set on Linux if I buy one of their processors.
gmerc 1y ago
This is the start of a state orchestrated AI war economy.
t1234s 1y ago
Any chance this move gives $INTC some legs long term?
xyst 1y ago
How to buy out competition, kill their product offerings, and further your own market dominance without improving your own product.
synergy20 1y ago
smart move for nvidia, as amd is the true competitor, keeping using amd's cpu will just help to build up a competitor fast. also this helps intel to figure out its foundry business and it might work someday, which also benefits nvidia as now its only choice is tsmc.
twothreeone 1y ago
People have been talking about the concentration of risk in popular indices, now large caps are buying each other's stakes? Intel's stock is up 27% today..
phendrenad2 1y ago
Called it. I knew Nvidia had nowhere left to go, with that insanely high valuation, other than to start buying competitors and adjacent companies. I don't think this is the end, either.
- mettamage 1y ago
  Link to your comment? I am curious to read it.
  - phendrenad2 1y ago
    I don't think I actually commented it anywhere, I said think I said it to some friends IRL. It's just been my observation that, when a company's valuation suddenly spikes, the company usually tries to "lock in" those gains by diversifying.
    - mettamage 1y ago
      Ah, I see. Fair.
notnullorvoid 1y ago
There's a lot of concern in the comments here about what this means for ARC. The size of this investment while large isn't enough to warrant jeopardizing ARC though. Intel has a responsibility to all shareholders, and diminishing ARC would be a bad move for overall shareholder value. If Nvidia did try to exert any pressure to scrap ARC, that would be both a huge financial and geopolitical scandal. It's in the best interest of the US to not only support Intel's local manufacturing, but also it's GPU tech.
- newsclues 1y ago
  Could they use nvidia ip for the future arc line?
shmerl 1y ago
I won't trust Nvidia not doing it for nefarious purposes.
FpUser 1y ago
Why there is no antitrust involved? this I think can affect AMD.
maxlin 1y ago
No idea what to think of this. I don't want Intel to die, but what will this do to their GPU business they're competing with NVIDIA on. And at worst this leads to even more consolidation
techsystems 1y ago
The reason why Nvidia is buying now does not have to do anything with Arc or GPU competition. There are mainly two reasons. 1) This year, Intel, TSMC, and Samsung announced their latest factories' yields. Intel was the earliest, with 18A, while Samsung was the most recent. TSMC yieled above 60%, Intel below 60%, and Samsung around 50% (but Samsung's tech is basically a generation ahead and technically more precise), and Samsung could improve their yields the most due to the way set up the processes, where 70% is the target. Until last year, Samsung was in the second place, and with the idea that Intel caught up so fast and taking Samsung's position at least for this year, Nvidia bought Intel's stock since it's been getting cheaper since COVID. 2) It's just generally good to diversify into your competitors. Every company does this, especially when the price is cheap.
- cherioo 1y ago
  I am curious where you get your information about Samsung being more “precise”. I was recently looking into 2nm myself, and based on wikipedia article on 2nm, TSMC 2nm is about 50% more dense than the samsung and intel equivalent. They aren’t remotely the same thing. Samsung 2nm and Intel 18A are about as dense as TSMC 3nm, that’s been in production for years.
  - tiffanyh 1y ago
    This information is a bit dated but ... Since "nm" is meaningless these days, the transistor count/mm2 is below. As reference: TSMC 3nm is ~290 million transistors/mm2 (MTr/mm2). IBM TSMC Intel Samsung 22nm 16.50 16nm/14nm 28.88 44.67 33.32 10nm 52.51 100.76 51.82 7nm 91.20 237.18 95.08 5nm 171.30 3nm 292.21 2nm 333.33 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27063034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27063034 https://www.techradar.com/news/ibm-unveils-worlds-first-2nm-chip https://www.techradar.com/news/ibm-unveils-worlds-first-2nm-...
    - cherioo 1y ago
      I think the intel 7nm is unrealistic. If true intel wouldn’t be “behind” According to Wikipedia intel 7nm density is ~62 MTr/mm2. I cannot find the source wikichip page mentioned in your reference post. FWIW, I am not in the semi industry and all my info are from Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_nm_process https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_nm_process https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_nm_process https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_nm_process
dismalaf 1y ago
Strategically this is good for the US and the West. Intel needs to survive because they have the only advanced fabs that aren't within reach of China. But as a consumer, I hate this. Intel APUs have become quite good and are great for Linux users. I don't want Nvidia's bullshit infecting them. Jenson wants to be the Apple of chips and we'll all be worse off if Nvidia SoCs become ubiquitous.
DrNosferatu 1y ago
I would say it's basically a bailout. Probably government-mandated.
WalterBright 1y ago
Looks like I sold my Intel too soon!
ck2 1y ago
So USA now owns 10% of Intel Did we make $500 Million off this? Do we own 10% of Nvidia too? Or is that coming soon? Hard to keep up with the now acceptable socialism
glitchc 1y ago
Almost 15% of Intel is now owned between the US govt. and NVidia.
raspasov 1y ago
Apple is so glad to be out of the Intel hellhole,
j45 1y ago
Man, talk about tables turning.
tracker1 1y ago
I'm mixed on this, only because when they've done similar hybrid chips with AMD GPUs in the past the support has been poor and dropped off rather quickly.
uberdru 1y ago
Exactly what Buffett put into Bank of America in 2011. Not sure what that means, but. . . data points: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/warren-buffett-invested-5-billion-bank-of-america-made-fortune-2020-10-1029690339 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/warren-buffe...
mmaunder 1y ago
Intel should never have existed in the first place. We should have gone the RISC route in the 80s and 90s and it took 30 years for the world to realize that with ARM. It’s like we’re continuously resuscitating a zombie to terrorize us, instead of just letting it die.
ClassAndBurn 1y ago
Nvidia sees the forest of the trees. The consequences of the US government buying steaks and Intel are that there will be Federal requirements for us companies using Intel. This is entirely about the foundry business. Nvidia is at risk when 100% of the production of its intellectual property occurs in Taiwan. They're more interested than anyone else in diversifying their foundry solutions. Intel has just been a terrible partner and totally disregards its customers. It's only because of the new strategic need for the US to have a foundry business that the government is saving until. NVIDIA is understandably supportive of this.
hamonrye 1y ago
explains why lspci queries integrated NVIDIA graphics. bit of bearish market given 1bn is equivalent to a 1% stake in one of the largest chip manifactuers on the face of the world
insane_dreamer 1y ago
The irony here is that Intel once tried to buy Nvidia for $20B, but Intel's board rejected the deal as "too expensive" and Intel should build its own GPUs.
link89 1y ago
NVIDIA has started integrating NVLink with the x86 CPU ecosystem. It's possible that NVLink will overcome CXL in this competition, just as CUDA once defeated OpenCL.
lyu07282 1y ago
I for one am happy that our capitalist overlords have finally shredded the last remnants of the pretense, but it probably causes a lot of issues for economists who have to explain why this is all fine and definitely normal.
gonyanghn 1y ago
For a moment I read the title as Nvidia buys Intel for $5B
senorqa 1y ago
I think trump told nvidia to buy those shares
techlatest_net 1y ago
[dead]
nerpderp82 1y ago
This is Nvidia bribing Intel to not compete with it. This is lousy for everyone.
Ecko123 1y ago
[dead]
BobbyTables2 1y ago
NVIDIA should probably have spent $5B on manure instead… They probably assume Intel is more similar to them in skill and execution than what’s reality…
franciseni722 1y ago
IFS Bottleneck means; NVIDIA buys time, Intel loses it and Blackwell ultra slips. RISC-V (Tenstorrent) + AMD ROCm keep the pipeline moving while NVIDIA polishes it's hammer. Lesson; Adage (Old Norse inspired) “Hamarr klofnaði, er vé fann eigi leið; Spjót fló, en skjár var eigi bundinn.” Translation back to English “The hammer split, when craft found not its path; The spear flew forth, yet screen was never bound.” This mirrors the original iambic pentameter adage, but cast in skaldic-styled compactness, tying the hammer (Mjölnir) to the broken driver/kernel path, and the spear (Gungnir) to the unpatched Wayland/X11 display stack. Something like Snorri Sturlosson might've slipped into the prose Edda? except it's about GPUs and Linux drivers.
novacoin 1y ago
Like a tech Völuspa?

1018 points by stycznik 1y ago

Intel dead.

Give up 0.1% of shares to get 5% of Intel. Seems to be an easy bet, if for no other reason than to make the US Government (Trump) happy. Trump gets to tout his +30% return on investment.

varshithr 1y ago

Grandma smiling from heaven

monkeydust 1y ago

Precursor to full acquisition perhaps...also maybe Jensen play to Trump a bit in this.

amo1111 1y ago
If there’s a time to do it, now would be the time with the current administration looking at all the regulatory blowback.
hvb2 1y ago
It would be 100% Trump to have Nvidia buy Intel and then announce how good of an investment decision he made by buying a slice of intel. USA, where the federal government is picking winners and losers by making risky stock bets with public money.
- delfinom 1y ago
  Not even the government at this point. The oligarchs are now in full control of the US and are dividing up their kingdoms. The plans for glulags for detractors are also being placed.
  - geertj 1y ago
    > The plans for glulags for detractors are also being placed. This needlessly divisive and devoid of any factual basis. No gulags will exist and you know it.
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      > This needlessly divisive and devoid of any factual basis. No gulags will exist and you know it. What about "Alligator Alcatraz", that has been called "concentration camp" [1] (so comparable with a gulag), or where the Korean detainees from the raid on the Hyundai/LG plant ended up, alleging utterly horrible conditions [2]? And there's bound to be more places like the latter, that was most likely just the tip of the iceberg and we only know about the conditions there because the South Korean government raised a huge stink and got the workers out of there. Okay, Alcatraz 2.0 did get suspended in August to my knowledge, but that's only temporary. It's bound to get the legal issues cleaned up and then be re-opened - or the case makes its way through to the Supreme Court with the same result to be expected. [1] https://newrepublic.com/article/197508/alligator-alcatraz-trump-concentration-camp https://newrepublic.com/article/197508/alligator-alcatraz-tr... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c07v1j98ydvo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c07v1j98ydvo
      - PKop 1y ago
        Those people aren't American citizens, the comparison doesn't fit.
        TheCoelacanth 1y ago
        They didn't get due process, so there's no way to be sure that American citizens aren't getting sent there.
Panzer04 1y ago
If you wanted to acquire Intel you'd do it now. Maybe Intel's future products are garbage and they do worse - but the upside seems pretty high otherwise. This seems like a bit of a firesale price to acquire an advanced fab and CPU maker. Sure, it's Intel and they haven't been doing great, but companies with solid reliable outlooks don't trade this cheaply. Ofc I would kind of hope/expect antitrust to object given that Intel makes both GPUs and CPUs, and Nvidia is/has dipped their toes into CPU production as well.
- fidotron 1y ago
  > If you wanted to acquire Intel you'd do it now. Intel still has to go through a lot of reorg (i.e. massive cuts) to get to a happy place, and this is what their succession of CEOs have been procrastinating over.
  - baq 1y ago
    Judging by my linkedin feed the 'a lot of reorg' is underway.
    - fidotron 1y ago
      Bluntly, Intel has corporate cancer, and it requires removing the actual cancers, not a sort of 20% haircut.
  - Panzer04 1y ago
    I recall reading a reddit comment (resounding source, I know) that claimed the reason Intel's e-cores are crushing it is because they actually synthesise them, while the P-cores are a bunch of bespoke circuits bodged together. One wonders just how bad things must have been internally for that to be the state of one of their core IPs in this day and age...

beameup10 1y ago

Wasn't Nvidia working on their own CPU design? Will they drop that?

JonChesterfield 1y ago
They're shipping arm derived cpus and have been for years.
- vFunct 1y ago
  They also use RISC-V cores throughout their products
  - yvdriess 1y ago
    And tilera in their DPUs

amo1111 1y ago

This has been an interesting 1.5 months for Intel on all fronts. I wonder how long this deal was in the making, since the timing is impeccable, looking at the current administration's involvement with Intel.

pjmlp 1y ago

So AMD got ATI, and now NVidia gets Intel.

DiskoHexyl 1y ago
Difference is, AMD wasn't a competitor for ATi. One mostly built CPU's, while another- GPUs. These two, on the other hand, are competing in several major product categories. Overall, not a good look
- pjmlp 1y ago
  I doubt we would be seeing Dell selling NVidia ARM CPUs anytime soon. However I do imagine Intel GPUs, that were never great to start with, might be doomed, long term. Also another possibility would be, there goes One API, which I doubt many people would care about, given how many rebrands SYSCL already went through.
- roboror 1y ago
  >One mostly built CPU's, while another- GPUs. I mean that also applies to Intel and Nvidia. Intel does make GPUs but their market impact is basically zero.
gpderetta 1y ago
Fitting. Then you used to bolt a GPU to a computer. These days you bolt a computer to a GPU.

ur-whale 1y ago

5B is a fairly tiny stake (Intel's market cap is around 120B), other than the "we're now working together" signal, why is this news?

nabla9 1y ago
In terms of voting stock, they become the biggest owner after US Commerce Department. As customer they get better access to Intel Foundry and can offload some capacity from TSMC.
- voxadam 1y ago
  > In terms of voting stock, they become the biggest owner after US Commerce Department. As I understand it the government's shares are non-voting.
  - snake42 1y ago
    The U.S. government won’t have a seat on the board and agreed to vote with Intel’s board on matters requiring shareholder approval “with limited exceptions.”
Panzer04 1y ago
tbf, If I were Nvidia and antitrust wasn't an issue I'd be tempted to buy the whole thing. Intel has a market cap just 2.5% of NVDA, so you could give away just 2.5% of your stock to buy the entirety of Intel. It's bonkers.
- amalcon 1y ago
  There are two scenarios here. In one, the AI bubble bursts (so Nvidia is overpriced now) and almost any value stock deal is good for them. In the other, it doesn't, and this gives them a limited hedge against problems with their most critical strategic partner (TSMC). It looks like a good deal either way and in any amount. But of course I am no expert.

joz1-k 1y ago

About 16 years ago, Intel was considered an ugly monopoly that Nvidia didn't like [0]. It seems as if they have switched sides now. [0]: <https://www.fudzilla.com/6882-nvidia-continues-comic-campaign-against-intel https://www.fudzilla.com/6882-nvidia-continues-comic-campaig...>

DrStartup 1y ago
they need domestic chip capabilities

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

gorgoiler 1y ago

> It is unclear if Intel will issue new stock for Nvidia to purchase Erm, a rather important point to bury down the story. The fiest question on anyone’s lips will be is this $5bn to build new chip technology, or $5bn for employees to spend on yachts?

Mistletoe 1y ago
It’s the most important part of the story. It’s so gross that companies can just dilute and create stock out of thin air like this. Why hold stock in Intel if the only people that ever buy the real stock and create buy pressure are the plebs? Here is the previous time… > Intel stock experienced dilution because the U.S. government converted CHIPS Act grants into an equity stake, acquiring a significant ownership percentage at a discounted price, which increased the total number of outstanding shares and reduced existing shareholders' ownership percentage, according to The Motley Fool and Investing.com. This led to roughly 11% dilution for existing shareholders
- geertj 1y ago
  > It’s so gross that companies can just dilute and create stock out of thin air like this. Intel is up 30% pre market on this news so I think the existing shareholders will be fine.
  - 93po 1y ago
    i stole $100 from you, but you later won a scratch off for $300, so my stealing was ok
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - Mistletoe 1y ago
    And it is already trending down today, I wonder how long it will stay up and how long it will take the average investor to figure out NVDA isn't buying INTC on the open market and driving up the price.

sho_hn 1y ago

nVidia has also been licensing their GPU IP to MediaTek recently, who are working on a 2nd generation of a SoC that combines their ARM cores with nVidia GPUs now, catering to e.g. the automotive market. Looks like using GPU IP to take over other brands' product lines is now officially an nVidia strategy. I guess the obvious worry here is whether Intel will continue development of their own dGPUs, which have a lovely open driver stack.

Panzer04 1y ago
Unless Nvidia outright absorbs intel I think Intel would have to be kind of crazy to stop developing GPUs. So long as the AI craze is hanging in there it feels like having that expertise and IP is going to have high potential upside.
- sho_hn 1y ago
  I'd agree, but Intel has also halted dGPU development efforts before, cf. the canned Larrabee project. Which was more troubled on the technology side however.
  - ACCount37 1y ago
    Yeah, Larrabee was nowhere near what they have now with Intel Arc. Would be foolish to throw that away now that they're finally getting closer to "a product someone may want to buy" with things like B50 and B60.
KeplerBoy 1y ago
Seems Nvidia needs an alternative to MediaTek or wants to pressure MediaTek given the announcement of x86 Intel/Nvidia SoCs and the delay of DGX Spark, GB10 and N1X. They wanted to launch DGX Spark early summer and it's nowhere to be seen, while strix halo is shipping in over 30+ SKUs from all major manufacturers.

bobajeff 1y ago

What's the significance of $5B of stock? Does that mean controlling share in Intel?

iamacyborg 1y ago
I would assume not given their market cap.
kypro 1y ago
No, but it's still a big stake from the largest player in semis. You wouldn't expect a move like that if they didn't see an opportunity there.
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
  Seems like when Microsoft invested in Apple to keep Apple from going out of business and turning Microsoft into a potential Monopoly.
Ozarkian 1y ago
It's written in the article that the $5B represents about 5% of Intel stock outstanding.
zeograd 1y ago
Article mentions it amounts to ~5% ownership
mr_toad 1y ago
It’s a corporate engagement ring.

fidotron 1y ago

Possibly more curious than the investment: > Nvidia will also have Intel build custom x86 data center CPUs for its AI products for hyperscale and enterprise customers. Hell has frozen over at Intel. Actually listening to people that want to buy your stuff, whatever next? Presumably someone over there doesn't want the AI wave to turn into a repeat of their famous success with mobile. In the event Intel ever do get US based fabrication semi competitive again (and the national security motivation for doing so is intense) nVidia will likely have to be a major customer, so this does make sense. I remain doubtful that Intel can pull it off, and it will have to come from someone else.

baq 1y ago
If you were a big enough customer you could get a SKU for you, too. E.g. hyperscalers have Xeons which are not available for any other customers for any price.
- fidotron 1y ago
  But what they've completely resisted so far is any non trivial modification. They turned down Acorn about the 286, which led to Acorn creating the Arm, they have turned down various console makers, they turned down Apple on the iPhone, and so on. In all cases they thought the opportunities were beneath them. Intel has always been too much about what they want to sell you, not what you need. That worked for them when the two aligned over backwards compat. Clearly the threat of an Arm or RISC-V finding itself fused to a GPU running AI inference workloads has woken someone up, at last.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    > they have turned down various console makers The problem is, console manufacturers know precisely how much of their product they anticipate to sell, and it's usually a lot. The PlayStation 5 is 80 million units so far. And at that scale, the console manufacturers want to squeeze every vendor as hard as they can... and Intel didn't see the need to engage in a bidding war with AMD that would have given them a sizable revenue but very little profit margin compared to selling Xeon CPUs to hyperscalers where Intel has much more leverage to command higher prices and thus higher margins. > they turned down Apple on the iPhone Intel just was (and frankly, still is) unable to compete on the power envelope with ARM, that's why you never saw x86 take off on Android as well despite quite a few attempts at it. Apple only chose to go for Intel with its MacBook line as PowerPC was practically dead and offered no way to extract more performance, and they dropped Intel as soon as their own CPUs were competitive. To get Intel CPUs to the same level of power efficiency that M-series CPUs have would require a full rework of the entire CPU infrastructure and external stack, that would require money that even Intel at its best frankly did not have. And getting x86 to be power effective enough for a phone? Just forget it. > Clearly the threat of an Arm or RISC-V finding itself fused to a GPU running AI inference workloads has woken someone up, at last. Actually, that is surprising for me as well. NVIDIA's Tegra should easily be powerful enough to run the OS for training or inference workload. If I were to guess, NVIDIA wants to avoid getting caught too hard on the "selling AI shovels" train.

jfdi 1y ago

Great news for all involved. It also would seem to validate Apple’s unified architecture for inference, and imply AMD is getting close…

kllrnohj 1y ago
You mean AMD's unified architecture. They were a founder of the HSA Foundation that drove innovation in this space complete with Linux kernel investments and unified compute SDKs, and they had the first shipping hardware support.
- xbar 1y ago
  This is a strong take. AMD's actual commitment to open innovation over the past ~20 years has been game changing in a lot of segments. It is the aspect of AMD that makes it so much more appealing than intel from a hacker/consumer perspective.

JonChesterfield 1y ago

I can think of _nothing_ with a better shot at unseating nvidia than a merger with intel. Fingers crossed for ever closer union between the two.

ericmay 1y ago
They aren’t merging - this is Nvidia ensuring their tech is in Intel chips.
- JonChesterfield 1y ago
  Yes indeed. It's still a step in that direction that opens up a bunch of communication channels between the execs of the two companies. Things move slowly.
- rm445 1y ago
  Might rather see it the other way around - Nvidia getting license to create products with x86(_64) CPUs integrated in the silicon. Nvidia are the big boy in this transaction and they'll get what they want out of it. But I can see the attraction for Intel.
  - noncoml 1y ago
    I don't think they can, as AFAIK the agreement for x86_64 is that Intel and AMD cannot change hands. AMD will surely fight this tooth and nail in the courts But with the state of the courts today... who knows..
imiric 1y ago
You can't be serious. Intel was well on its way to be a considerable threat to NVIDIA with their Arc line of GPUs, which are getting better and cheaper with each generation. Perhaps not in the enterprise and AI markets yet, but certainly on the consumer side. This news muddies this approach, and I see it as a misstep for both Intel and for consumers. Intel is only helping NVIDIA, which puts them further away from unseating them than they were before. Competition is always a net positive for consumers, while mergers are always a net negative. This news will only benefit shareholders of both companies, and Intel shareholders only in the short-term. In the long-term, it's making NVIDIA more powerful.

qzw 1y ago

Remember when Microsoft invested in Apple when Apple was down in the dumps? This is giving similar vibes. That deal was arguably what saved Apple near its nadir. I’m not a fan of Intel’s past monopolistic practices, but for the sake of sustaining competition in the CPU/GPU market, I hope this deal works out for them even half as well as the MS deal did for Apple.

vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
All they need now is a CEO like Steve Jobs…
- __turbobrew__ 1y ago
  Jensen moves to intel …
tremon 1y ago
I don't think that's an apt comparison, given that Microsoft and Apple were more direct competitors than Intel and Nvidia; the latter have a more symbiotic relationship. I think the rationale is closer to the competitor of my competitor is my friend -- they face two threats by AMD growing larger in the CPU market: - a bigger R&D budget for their main competitor in the GPU market - since Nvidia doesn't have their own CPUs, they risk becoming more dependent on their main competitor for total system performance.
- readams 1y ago
  Here's Nvidia's CPUs, which are increasingly a required part of their data center offerings: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/grace-cpu/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/grace-cpu/
  - thyristan 1y ago
    Required in that Nvidia would like to sell them to you. But customers seem to be hesitant and prefer x86-based DGX and similar systems. At least from what I've heard and seen.

Sol- 1y ago

Nowadays I always wonder to what extent such deals are actually driven by market considerations and to what extent it's catering to the Trump administration. Token investments into this state enterprise named Intel seems to be a practical way to cater goodwill with the autocrats.

DarkmSparks 1y ago

After the arm buyout fell through, I guess this is the next best thing. Plus a good deal for nvidia since Intel is pretty desperate at this point.

scrlk 1y ago

> For personal computing, Intel will build and offer to the market x86 system-on-chips (SOCs) that integrate NVIDIA RTX GPU chiplets. These new x86 RTX SOCs will power a wide range of PCs that demand integration of world-class CPUs and GPUs. https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1750/nvidia-and-intel-to-develop-ai-infrastructure-and-personal https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1750/... What’s old is new again: back in 2017, Intel tried something similar with AMD (Kaby Lake-G). They paired a Kaby Lake CPU with a Vega GPU and HBM, but the product flopped: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-discontinue-kaby-lake-g-amd-graphics,40577.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-discontinue-kaby-lak...

ddalex 1y ago
That was targeted at supporting more tightly integrated and performant Macbooks .... it flopped because Apple came up with M1, not because it was bad per se.
- intvocoder 1y ago
  apple never shipped a product with that, but it made for an excellent hackintosh
  - ddalex 1y ago
    Exactly
- JonChesterfield 1y ago
  The ryzen APUs had a rocky start but are properly good now, the concept is sound
linuxftw 1y ago
To me, this just validates what AMD has been doing for over a decade. Integrated GPUs for personal computing are the way forward.
herodoturtle 1y ago

jgalt212 1y ago

INTC is strategically important company. They won't be allowed to fail. Of course, that doesn't mean the stock is a good investment. During the GFC, all the equity holders were wiped out all the bond holders got all their money back. Figure that one out.

baq 1y ago
That's quite literally why bonds are bonds and equity is equity...
- jgalt212 1y ago
  Perhaps, but you do understand that the probability of every tranche regardless of seniority getting paid in full and the equity getting nothing is zero. It's mathematically impossible to pin the waterfall like this.
  - baq 1y ago
    With good enough lawyers mathematically impossible is practically relative. Assume the game is rigged, play accordingly. If it doesn't make sense, it makes sense.

boxerab 1y ago

The enemy of my enemy is my friend

BoredPositron 1y ago

So that's probably it for the dedicated Intel GPUs. :/

whycome 1y ago

Also, the US Govt bought $8.9B in stock last month I guess https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1748/intel-and-trump-administration-reach-historic-agreement-to https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1748/...

ecocentrik 1y ago
Correction: Renegotiated a prior loan as a $8.9B stock purchase.
- phkahler 1y ago
  Does that mean Intel doesn't ever have to pay it back?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - KeplerBoy 1y ago
    It means Intel already paid it back. The dilution hurt all other owners.
    - hopelite 1y ago
      That is arguable. Regardless of everything else, currently Intel stock is up about 50% from recent averages. If investors were so hurt, they really should be selling right now, and there seems to be reason to do so because Intel's troubles have not gone away with this Nvidia stake that does not touch Intel's rotten underbelly.
      - KeplerBoy 1y ago
        Both statements can be true. Dilution hurts investors, but fresh cash and a strategic Nvidia partnership have huge potential upsides.

igtztorrero 1y ago

This is the first step that Nvidia takes to devour Intel.

seanalltogether 1y ago

It feels like the end is in sight for dedicated graphics chips in consumer devices. Phones, consoles, and now Apple silicon are proving that SoC designs with unified memory and focused thermals are a winning strategy for efficiency and speed. Nvidia may be happy enough to move the graphics strategy onto an SoC and keep discrete boards just for AI.

esseph 1y ago
Yet here I am just frothing for GPUs
whatevaa 1y ago
Yes for efficiency, not for speed.

JCM9 1y ago

Intel is a strategically important company for the United States. This smells like a token investment to appease the US government. Not saying it’s bad, but very much looks like that.

adrr 1y ago
Only the fab part is. Intel needs to separate the two. Maybe Nvidia, AMD, or Qualcomm can buy the the fab part.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  Why would either of these three be interested in buying a fab? The only other large player with its own fab is Samsung and Samsung has the same problem that Intel has, namedly a fab that is nowhere near close to TSMC. I agree that Intel would be better served to spin off its fab division, a potential buyer could be the US government for military and national security relevant projects.
  - adrr 1y ago
    Someone could be interested. It could also be Global Foundries. High risk big reward bet which the government is willing to help mitigate some of the risk with funding. They just need to separate business units.
    - DanielHB 1y ago
      Not an expert in the area, but I think the highest of the high-end chips is a big market, but not the biggest market as revenue for fabs. It is just the most profitable part of the market. Maybe this changed with the AI race but there are plenty of people buying older chips by the millions for all sorts of products.
      - mandevil 1y ago
        The key for getting (financial) value out of fabs is their time after they are the overtaken by the next node. The ability to keep the order book full after you have a better node is what pays off the fab. So its all the other chips- the chips for cars, for low-power internet connected devices, etc. that make the fab profitable. That is where TSMC's ability to work with different customers enables them to extract value from a fab that pure-play CPU makers struggle with.

wheybags 1y ago

I wonder what this means for Intel's Arc lineup. Would be a bit crazy to have privileged access to a competitor's roadmap through just owning a chunk of them. I also have to admit I really hope they dont cancel them. A triopoly is at least better than a duopoly (or realistically, a monopoly as AMD's competitiveness in gpus is pretty questionable)

vid 1y ago
That's what I think of, along with favour from their new investment sibling, the US government. AMD doesn't want to be super competitive, they like their margins and being second choice in a hypetastic market. Even though Arc has very low adoption, it was making signs of doing scrappy things, like enabling two 24GB GPUs on one card from third party vendors, which got the hobby/upstart community pretty excited. Ultimately it's not a real market giving the people what they want via competition, it's all contrived by politics and the biggest players.
Workaccount2 1y ago
It probably kills any prospect of Intel releasing a market disrupter card that many were calling for - a 64GB or 92GB card with even middling performance for under $1k. It's pretty clear AMD and Nvidia are gatekeeping memory so they can iterate over time and protect their datacenter cards. Intel had a prime opportunity to blow this up.
thescriptkiddie 1y ago
imho the entire point of this for nvidia is to kill arc
- rkomorn 1y ago
  Which is arguably kind of weird because where is it actually competing with NVIDIA? A hypothetical future, I guess? But also, does this amount of ownership even give them the ability to kill anything on Intel's roadmap without broad shareholder consensus (not that that's even how roadmaps are handled anyway)?
- simne 1y ago

alex1138 1y ago

I know AMD used to be lacking but these days I guess they're probably the go-to on Linux because they share changes with the community I don't like the idea of using Intel given their lack of disclosure for Spectre/Meltdown and some of their practices (towards AMD)

Symmetry 1y ago

SemiAccruate reported that NVidia had been dipping its toes into manufacturing its products using Intel's fabs several months ago, I'd assume that that's related.

saejox 1y ago

I hope this isn't "Shut-up" money to end ARC gpu development. i have an A770, i am very happy with it.

bilekas 1y ago
It's absolutely not, the ARC line is not a threat in any way to nVidia, it's to get it's feet into the CPU market without the initial setup costs and research it would take to start from scratch. They will be dominating AMD now on both fronts if things go smoothly for them.

gdiamos 1y ago

best news i've heard in days

bilekas 1y ago

This really wasn't a surprise, nVidia has seemed to be itching for a meaningful entry to the CPU market and when intel's CEO started undoing all and any future investment in the company it was clear everything was being setup for a sell off. 5 Billion is just a start but this is a gift for nVidia to eventually squire intel.

xbar 1y ago
I think if Nvidia wanted to acquire Intel, they would acquire Intel. Intel has never been so cheap relative to the kinds of IP assets that Nvidia values and probably will not be ever again if this and other investments keep it afloat. Trump's FTC would not block. You write with proper case-sensitivity for their titles which suggests some historic knowledge of the two. They have been very close partners on CPU+GPU for decades. This investment is not fundamentally changing that. The current CEO is more like a CFO--cutting costs and eliminating waste. There are two exits from that: sell off, as you say, and re-investment in the products of most likely future profit. This could be a signal that the latter is the plan and that the competitive aspects of the nVidia-intel partnership will be sidelined for a while.

OrvalWintermute 1y ago

I'm taking this investment as a validation of the competitiveness of AMD's APUs & Apple's Silicon.

glimshe 1y ago

Are we getting a new iteration of sub-$200 mini PCs with an RTX chiplet?! That would be an amazing replacement for my N100!

tasuki 1y ago

> Nvidia announced that it will buy $5 billion in Intel common stock at $23.28 per share, representing a roughly 5% ownership stake in Intel. (Intel stock is now up 33% in premarket trading.) Why/how is INTC premarket up from $24.90 around 30% (to $32), when Nvidia is buying the stock at $23.28 ? Who is selling the stock? I suppose the Intel board decided this? Why did they sell under the current market price? Didn't the Intel board have fiduciary duty to get as good a price from Nvidia as possible? If Nvidia buying stock moves it up so much, it seems like a bad deal to sell the stock for so little.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 1y ago
It's typical in these situations that the price per stock is negotiated, with current SP as a starting point. It's fairly unusual, I think, for the company selling stock to get a price significantly higher than market price. It's more typical that there's a slight discount. At least that's been the case for every stock I owned where dilution has occured. We also don't know yet when exactly this deal was negotiated and approved, so it's hard to actually say. Considering where INTC has been very recently(below $20), $23.28 seems very reasonable to me. The reason the stock surged up past $30 is the general market's reaction to the news, and subsequent buying pressure, not the stock transaction itself. It seems likely that once the exuberance cools down, the SP will pull back, where to I can't say. Somewhere between $25 and $30 would be my bet, but this is not financial advice, I'm just spitballing here.

belter 1y ago

NVIDIA is Jensen Huang life, and he is probably the best CEO in the USA. But he should be careful. Possible Shareholders lawsuits come with Discovery. NVIDIA sales to Coreweave for example, a company they have shares on is starting to look a lot like self-dealing. Also, since this Intel deal makes no sense for NVIDIA, a good observer would notice that lately, he seems to spend more time on Air Force One than with NVIDIA teams. The leak of any evidence, showing this was an investment ordered by the White House, will make his company hostage of future demands from the current corrupt administration. The timing is already incredibly suspicions. We will know for sure he become a hostage, if the next NVIDIA investment is on World Liberty Financial. "Anatomy of Two Giant Deals: The U.A.E. Got Chips. The Trump Team Got Crypto Riches." - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/us/politics/trump-uae-chips-witkoff-world-liberty.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/us/politics/trump-uae-chi...

rhetocj23 1y ago
The entire AI ecosystem that is being built out looks very suspect frankly..
high_na_euv 1y ago
Bullshit https://www.techpowerup.com/341137/nvidias-usd-5b-intel-investment-reveals-x86-gpu-nvlink-project https://www.techpowerup.com/341137/nvidias-usd-5b-intel-inve...
- belter 1y ago
  In 2007 Jen-Hsun Huang had “No CPU plans; can’t add much value.” explained Nvidia “cannot add much value” in the CPU market and would focus on GPUs/chipsets. In 2009 he said a no to an Intel-compatible x86 CPU. In 2022 he said If x86 already exists, we’ll just use/partner: “One of the rules of our company is not to squander resources on something that already exists. If something already exists, for example, an x86 CPU, we’ll just use it… we’ll partner with them.” No. They were ordered to make this investment...

aenopix 1y ago

Capitalism, all at the hands of just a bunch of people.

juancn 1y ago

AMD is much stronger in unified memory architectures than Nvidia at this point. It kinda makes sense, with the AI push. I wonder what this means for the ARC line of GPUs?

HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago

I'm guessing NVidia didn't do this by choice. Propping up Intel doesn't seem in their best interests, nor does it do their share holders any favors by diluting their rapid growth.

danans 1y ago
> I'm guessing NVidia didn't do this by choice. Propping up Intel doesn't seem in their best interests In a top-down oligarchy, their best interests are served by focusing on the desires of the great leader, in contrast to a competitive bottom-up market economy, where they would focus on the desires of customers and shareholders.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
nxobject 1y ago
There's some case for self-interest – propping up another fab etc. – but I do wonder how much of it is USG. (The economic case for Intel integrating Nvidia silicon on-chip doesn't too much sense to me: there's no growth potential in commodity/consumer x86, and maybe they can shove their new integrated Nvidia in front of enterprise buyers, but I'd be a dubious re: ROI.)
high_na_euv 1y ago
Bullshit https://www.techpowerup.com/341137/nvidias-usd-5b-intel-investment-reveals-x86-gpu-nvlink-project https://www.techpowerup.com/341137/nvidias-usd-5b-intel-inve...
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
  I'm not sure that "bullshit" is warranted... Sure it makes sense for NVidia to propagate proprietary interfaces like NVLink, as well as to do anything that helps drive their own GPU sales, but I'm not sure how you so confidently conclude from that that propping up Intel is in NVidia's best interest ?

littlecranky67 1y ago

This is a death blow to the Intel GPU+AI efforts and should not be allowed by the regulators. It is clear that Intel needs the downstream, low-cost GPU market segment to have a portfolio of AI chips based on chiplets, where most defective ones end up in the consumer grade GPUs based on manufacturing yield. NVidias interest is now for Intel not to enter either the GPU market, nor the AI market - which Intel was preparing for with its GPU efforts in recent years.

dagmx 1y ago
The regulators want this because it’s bolstering the last domestic owned fab. Any down the road repercussions be damned from their perspective.
bogwog 1y ago
Intel had an opportunity to differentiate themselves by offering more VRAM than Nvidia is willing to put in their consumer cards. It seemed like that was where Battlemage was going. But now, are they really going to undermine this partnership for that? Their GPUs probably aren't going to become a cash cow anytime soon, but this thing probably will. The mindset among American business leaders of the past two decades has been to prioritize short-term profits above all else.
- pchangr 1y ago
  I remember when I was studying for an MBA.. a professor was talking about the intangible value of a brand .. and finance.. and how they would reflect on each other .. At some point we were decomposing the parts of a balance sheet and they asked if one could sell the goodwill to invest in something else .. and the answer was of course .. no… well.. America has proven us wrong .. the way you sell the goodwill is to basically enshittification.. you quickly burn all your brand reputation by lowering your costs with shittier products .. your goodwill goes to 0 but your income increases so stock go up .. the CEO gets a fat bonus for it .. even tho the company itself is destroyed .. then the CEO quickly abandons ship and does the same on their next company .. rinse and repeat… infinite money!

GeekyBear 1y ago

Could AMD argue that Intel's licence agreement for x86-64 is at risk since it requires that Intel (and AMD) may not change hands?

high_na_euv 1y ago
No, why?

654wak654 1y ago

I'm very pessimistic about this. Goodbye to those nice, budget-friendly intel GPUs. nGreedia is going to continue selling 8 gig cards to consumers forever.

LarsDu88 1y ago

Microsoft bailing out Apple vibes. This time around Nvidia should HOLDL the stock

swarnie 1y ago

Nana can stop spinning in her grave now, i think he just broke even....

jonas21 1y ago

NVDA stock is up 3.5% so far today, which is ~$150B, or slightly more than one Intel. $5B is pocket change in comparison.

prewett 1y ago
Except that Nvidia, Inc. doesn't own any of that NVDA stock, other people do, and they cannot access that money. Nvidia, Inc. owns net profit, which is orders of magnitude less than market cap. Last year's net profit was just under $73 billion. ($5 billion is still very affordable, too be sure).
- jonas21 1y ago
  The board could issue more stock, which would dilute existing shareholders by about 0.1% and (in theory) cause the stock price to drop by 0.1%. But yeah, it's probably easier to just use cash on hand.
- sekai 1y ago
  > Except that Nvidia, Inc. doesn't own any of that NVDA stock, other people do, and they cannot access that money. Nvidia, Inc. owns net profit, which is orders of magnitude less than market cap. Last year's net profit was just under $73 billion. ($5 billion is still very affordable, too be sure). Not all deals are made in cash, they can borrow money against their market share.
- baq 1y ago
  I think you may have missed AMC and TSLA; for quite a while their best selling products and biggest revenue drivers were their stock. Reflexivity is a thing; NVDA could issue 5, 10 or 20B and I don't think the price would move very much in this market. (Note that could change tomorrow.)

lacoolj 1y ago

No way this doesn't get blocked by antitrust. This will make them way too large and Intel is already trying to sell off (US govt bought $10B couple weeks ago)

wmf 1y ago
The government is the one pushing this deal. They won't block it.
y-c-o-m-b 1y ago
> No way this doesn't get blocked by antitrust That action may cease to exist soon, especially after Vance is POTUS and the courts stacked with Peter Thiel loyalists that back his vision of anti-competition. Bet on it.
nxobject 1y ago
USG's far more interested in (scare quotes intentional) "AI dominance", and pushing American tech to fuse to do so – damn the consumer.
micromacrofoot 1y ago
who's running antitrust these days

ErigmolCt 1y ago

A weird kind of full-circle moment: Intel used to laugh off Nvidia, then tried Kaby Lake-G with AMD (RIP), and now they're handing over CPU real estate to the company that wiped the floor with their own GPU efforts

kittikitti 1y ago

Intel will soon say, "Et tu, Brute?"

evanjrowley 1y ago

Nvidia's stake in Intel could have terrible consequences. First, it is in Nvidia's interest to kill Intel's Arc graphics, and that would be very bad because it is the only thing brighing GPU prices down for consumers. Second, the death of Intel graphics / Arc would be extremely bad for Linux, because Intel's approach to GPU drivers is the best for compatibility, wheras Nvidia is actively hostile to drivers on Linux. Third, Intel is the only company marketing consumer-grade graphics virtualization (SR-IOV), and the loss of that would make Nvidia's enterprise chips the only game in town, meaning the average consumer gets less performance, less flexibility, and less security on their computers.

matheusmoreira 1y ago
I agree. As a Linux user who favors Intel hardware due to their Linux support, I gotta say the future looks bleak.
- tliltocatl 1y ago
  Well, AMD isn't going away yet, and they do seem to have finally released the advantage of open-source drivers. But that's still bad very for competition and prices.
- throwaway2037 1y ago
  > As a Linux user who favors Intel hardware due to their Linux support I'm confused here. Are you talking about Intel CPUs or GPUs? And does AMD not have excellent Linux support for their own CPUs and GPUs?
  - matheusmoreira 1y ago
    > Intel CPUs or GPUs Both. Also things like sound cards, network cards, peripherals in general. My happiness and stability while using Linux has been well correlated with the number of devices with Intel in the name. Every single device without Intel invariably becomes a major pain in my ass every single time. It's gotten to the point I assume it will just work if it's Intel. > And does AMD not have excellent Linux support for their own CPUs and GPUs? They're making a lot of progress but Intel is still years ahead of them. Earlier this year I was researching PC parts for a build and discovered AMD was still working on merging functionality like on die temperature sensors into the kernel. It makes me think I won't have a full feature set on Linux if I buy one of their processors.

gmerc 1y ago

This is the start of a state orchestrated AI war economy.

t1234s 1y ago

Any chance this move gives $INTC some legs long term?

xyst 1y ago

How to buy out competition, kill their product offerings, and further your own market dominance without improving your own product.

synergy20 1y ago

smart move for nvidia, as amd is the true competitor, keeping using amd's cpu will just help to build up a competitor fast. also this helps intel to figure out its foundry business and it might work someday, which also benefits nvidia as now its only choice is tsmc.

twothreeone 1y ago

People have been talking about the concentration of risk in popular indices, now large caps are buying each other's stakes? Intel's stock is up 27% today..

phendrenad2 1y ago

Called it. I knew Nvidia had nowhere left to go, with that insanely high valuation, other than to start buying competitors and adjacent companies. I don't think this is the end, either.

mettamage 1y ago
Link to your comment? I am curious to read it.
- phendrenad2 1y ago
  I don't think I actually commented it anywhere, I said think I said it to some friends IRL. It's just been my observation that, when a company's valuation suddenly spikes, the company usually tries to "lock in" those gains by diversifying.
  - mettamage 1y ago
    Ah, I see. Fair.

notnullorvoid 1y ago

There's a lot of concern in the comments here about what this means for ARC. The size of this investment while large isn't enough to warrant jeopardizing ARC though. Intel has a responsibility to all shareholders, and diminishing ARC would be a bad move for overall shareholder value. If Nvidia did try to exert any pressure to scrap ARC, that would be both a huge financial and geopolitical scandal. It's in the best interest of the US to not only support Intel's local manufacturing, but also it's GPU tech.

newsclues 1y ago
Could they use nvidia ip for the future arc line?

shmerl 1y ago

I won't trust Nvidia not doing it for nefarious purposes.

FpUser 1y ago

Why there is no antitrust involved? this I think can affect AMD.

maxlin 1y ago

No idea what to think of this. I don't want Intel to die, but what will this do to their GPU business they're competing with NVIDIA on. And at worst this leads to even more consolidation

techsystems 1y ago

The reason why Nvidia is buying now does not have to do anything with Arc or GPU competition. There are mainly two reasons. 1) This year, Intel, TSMC, and Samsung announced their latest factories' yields. Intel was the earliest, with 18A, while Samsung was the most recent. TSMC yieled above 60%, Intel below 60%, and Samsung around 50% (but Samsung's tech is basically a generation ahead and technically more precise), and Samsung could improve their yields the most due to the way set up the processes, where 70% is the target. Until last year, Samsung was in the second place, and with the idea that Intel caught up so fast and taking Samsung's position at least for this year, Nvidia bought Intel's stock since it's been getting cheaper since COVID. 2) It's just generally good to diversify into your competitors. Every company does this, especially when the price is cheap.

cherioo 1y ago
I am curious where you get your information about Samsung being more “precise”. I was recently looking into 2nm myself, and based on wikipedia article on 2nm, TSMC 2nm is about 50% more dense than the samsung and intel equivalent. They aren’t remotely the same thing. Samsung 2nm and Intel 18A are about as dense as TSMC 3nm, that’s been in production for years.
- tiffanyh 1y ago
  This information is a bit dated but ... Since "nm" is meaningless these days, the transistor count/mm2 is below. As reference: TSMC 3nm is ~290 million transistors/mm2 (MTr/mm2). IBM TSMC Intel Samsung 22nm 16.50 16nm/14nm 28.88 44.67 33.32 10nm 52.51 100.76 51.82 7nm 91.20 237.18 95.08 5nm 171.30 3nm 292.21 2nm 333.33 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27063034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27063034 https://www.techradar.com/news/ibm-unveils-worlds-first-2nm-chip https://www.techradar.com/news/ibm-unveils-worlds-first-2nm-...
  - cherioo 1y ago
    I think the intel 7nm is unrealistic. If true intel wouldn’t be “behind” According to Wikipedia intel 7nm density is ~62 MTr/mm2. I cannot find the source wikichip page mentioned in your reference post. FWIW, I am not in the semi industry and all my info are from Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_nm_process https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_nm_process https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_nm_process https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_nm_process

dismalaf 1y ago

Strategically this is good for the US and the West. Intel needs to survive because they have the only advanced fabs that aren't within reach of China. But as a consumer, I hate this. Intel APUs have become quite good and are great for Linux users. I don't want Nvidia's bullshit infecting them. Jenson wants to be the Apple of chips and we'll all be worse off if Nvidia SoCs become ubiquitous.

DrNosferatu 1y ago

I would say it's basically a bailout. Probably government-mandated.

WalterBright 1y ago

Looks like I sold my Intel too soon!

ck2 1y ago

So USA now owns 10% of Intel Did we make $500 Million off this? Do we own 10% of Nvidia too? Or is that coming soon? Hard to keep up with the now acceptable socialism

glitchc 1y ago

Almost 15% of Intel is now owned between the US govt. and NVidia.

raspasov 1y ago

Apple is so glad to be out of the Intel hellhole,

j45 1y ago

Man, talk about tables turning.

tracker1 1y ago

I'm mixed on this, only because when they've done similar hybrid chips with AMD GPUs in the past the support has been poor and dropped off rather quickly.

uberdru 1y ago

Exactly what Buffett put into Bank of America in 2011. Not sure what that means, but. . . data points: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/warren-buffett-invested-5-billion-bank-of-america-made-fortune-2020-10-1029690339 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/warren-buffe...

mmaunder 1y ago

Intel should never have existed in the first place. We should have gone the RISC route in the 80s and 90s and it took 30 years for the world to realize that with ARM. It’s like we’re continuously resuscitating a zombie to terrorize us, instead of just letting it die.

ClassAndBurn 1y ago

Nvidia sees the forest of the trees. The consequences of the US government buying steaks and Intel are that there will be Federal requirements for us companies using Intel. This is entirely about the foundry business. Nvidia is at risk when 100% of the production of its intellectual property occurs in Taiwan. They're more interested than anyone else in diversifying their foundry solutions. Intel has just been a terrible partner and totally disregards its customers. It's only because of the new strategic need for the US to have a foundry business that the government is saving until. NVIDIA is understandably supportive of this.

hamonrye 1y ago

explains why lspci queries integrated NVIDIA graphics. bit of bearish market given 1bn is equivalent to a 1% stake in one of the largest chip manifactuers on the face of the world

insane_dreamer 1y ago

The irony here is that Intel once tried to buy Nvidia for $20B, but Intel's board rejected the deal as "too expensive" and Intel should build its own GPUs.

link89 1y ago

NVIDIA has started integrating NVLink with the x86 CPU ecosystem. It's possible that NVLink will overcome CXL in this competition, just as CUDA once defeated OpenCL.

lyu07282 1y ago

I for one am happy that our capitalist overlords have finally shredded the last remnants of the pretense, but it probably causes a lot of issues for economists who have to explain why this is all fine and definitely normal.

gonyanghn 1y ago

For a moment I read the title as Nvidia buys Intel for $5B

senorqa 1y ago

I think trump told nvidia to buy those shares

techlatest_net 1y ago

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nerpderp82 1y ago

This is Nvidia bribing Intel to not compete with it. This is lousy for everyone.

Ecko123 1y ago

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BobbyTables2 1y ago

NVIDIA should probably have spent $5B on manure instead… They probably assume Intel is more similar to them in skill and execution than what’s reality…

franciseni722 1y ago

IFS Bottleneck means; NVIDIA buys time, Intel loses it and Blackwell ultra slips. RISC-V (Tenstorrent) + AMD ROCm keep the pipeline moving while NVIDIA polishes it's hammer. Lesson; Adage (Old Norse inspired) “Hamarr klofnaði, er vé fann eigi leið; Spjót fló, en skjár var eigi bundinn.” Translation back to English “The hammer split, when craft found not its path; The spear flew forth, yet screen was never bound.” This mirrors the original iambic pentameter adage, but cast in skaldic-styled compactness, tying the hammer (Mjölnir) to the broken driver/kernel path, and the spear (Gungnir) to the unpatched Wayland/X11 display stack. Something like Snorri Sturlosson might've slipped into the prose Edda? except it's about GPUs and Linux drivers.

novacoin 1y ago

Like a tech Völuspa?