7 ms·
Note the first line: > SoftBank said Tuesday it has sold its entire stake in U.S. chipmaker Nvidia for $5.83 billion as the Japanese giant looks to capitalize
by lifthrasiir 1y ago
Note the first line:
> SoftBank said Tuesday it has sold its entire stake in U.S. chipmaker Nvidia for $5.83 billion as the Japanese giant looks to capitalize its “all in” bet on ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
They are switching gears, not exiting, folks.
- est 1y agothe key is "looks to" Softbank can also choose not to.
- zerosizedweasle 1y agoMaybe they're trying to bail out OpenAI, but that's still not close to the amount they would need to do that. OpenAI needs like 1.3 trillion dollars.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ares623 1y agoSelling the _entire_ stake sounds really aggressive though? Is that normal? Even if you're all-in on OpenAI, does it not make financial sense to have _some_ stake in Nvidia considering they are the only ones with an actual moat? Unless there are CUDA alternative breakthroughs we will hear about in the next few days.
- l5870uoo9y 1y agoIsn't it merely a matter of time before China has an alternative?
- viraptor 1y agoThey don't even need to invent anything. Just put in some work to polish what already exists: https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA
- actionfromafar 1y agoIMHO AMD should have done this a decade ago.
- viraptor 1y agoThis was sponsored by AMD for quite a while and dropped. There had to be some talks behind closed doors that resulted in the current situation. I mean, we all know they should've and they're not dumb either.
- chemmail 1y agoAll you have to look at is ASIC miners. Once they had them, they were 10x faster than GPUs easily and made GPUs useless for those algos. Something very similar can happen soon.
- adastra22 1y agoThe fundamentals are different. Bitcoin mining is not intrinsically suited to acceleration on a GPU. It is a not-very-wide serial integer operation. AI inference on the other hand is basically just very large floating point tensor matrix multiplication. What does an ASIC for matmul look like? A GPU.
- skylurk 1y agoSorta? If that was the full story, TPU would not be a thing.
- lukeschlather 1y agoI'm not an expert in chip design by any means but I think it's fair to say that TPU is a marketing term and it's not substantially different from a GPU like an H100. H100's cores are also called "Tensor Cores."
- jasonwatkinspdx 1y agoYou are entirely mistaken. The TPU and GPU are organized very differently particularly with how the memory subsystem works. In the big picture, TPUs are systolic arrays. They don't have threading, divergence, or similar. GPUs in the big picture are SIMT, a hybrid of SIMD and multithreading where individual data streams in SIMD are relaxed to allow them to diverge somewhat. Memory Wise the TPU can keep the partial products right in the array. Parameters and weights are held in large on die scratch memories, and backing those are streams coming from the HBM. The TPU acts as a single giant CISC coprocessor, and has much more predictable memory and communication patterns vs a GPU, which its design exploits for higher efficiency at inference vs GPUs. So even if they use the word "tensor" and both have HBM based memory systems, how those are actually architected is very different.
- vintermann 1y agoFor researchers and academics, cuda is painful to avoid, but I'm not sure that it is for large companies, once the time comes to train and deploy large models.
- delaminator 1y agoAmazon’s Idaho 2Gw data center it’s building for Anthropic has 0 Nvidia Cuda cores. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-says-anthropic-will-use-1-million-of-its-custom-ai-chips-141829311.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-says-anthropic-will-us... > Anthropic is using 500,000 of Amazon’s Trainium2 chips for its Claude AI models as part of the tech giant's Project Rainier
- creer 1y ago> Selling the _entire_ stake sounds really aggressive though? Is that normal? They did not. They sold MOST of their stake in Nvidia long ago before anyone paid attention to Nvidia vs AI. It's one decision as part of a complex cloud of decisions. Also this "stake" was around one thousandth of Nvidia. Minor. Most companies have lots of owners with much larger stakes.
- greycol 1y agoIf you believe the AI bubble will pop in the same way as the dotcom bubble and feel you can pick winners it makes sense. It would be like selling cisco stock for google. You can still invest in cisco later if you believe they'll grow but you might expect a stagnant period and definitely expect a drop as they don't have as much demand. NVidia is a safe bet to continue exisitng and being profitable but by being so central to the market you could almost guarantee a large drop in stock price while other companies are a gamble.
- rvz 1y agoSo averaging up then? That's even worse. More like degeneracy and gambling.
- randomNumber7 1y agoI would have thought that the OpenAI bet is way more risky, because if someone comes along with a better model it could really hurt OpenAI. NVIDIA seems harder to dethrone imo.
- nolok 1y agoIt's SoftBank though, weird risk taking investments seems to be their jam.
- hobofan 1y agoIn many ways OpenAI is transitioning towards an end-user facing product business. They have by far the strongest brand among consumers and are positioning themselves to take on Google/Meta in the ad business. By proxy, having the strongest frontier model becomes less and less necessary for them and instead building a strong product by properly layering medium-strong models in a cost-efficient way is the priority.
- nly 1y agoIt's hard to see how they become profitable enough to justify current valuations. The numbers are just mind boggling even in the optimistic scenario.
- mrdevlar 1y agoThey recognise that the larger bubble is in the datacenters. Most of the hardware we are using was designed for computer graphics not AI. Now that China isn't buying Nvidia any longer and actively trying to get their own companies to produce hardware, what happens to all these datacenters when a company produces a device that has 80% of the performance of the current Nvidia hardware but 20% of its power consumption?
- Ekaros 1y agoEven double the energy consumption is not that bad for half the price. at 20 cents per kWh over 5 years 1 kW load would be 8760. So from 30000 to 15000 you would still come ahead in cost.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ookblah 1y agolol, after wework you'd be an idiot to think it was nothing more than shilling their "winner" to potentially dump on the public. but i guess as long as you can make money on the way up.
- bgwalter 1y agoSoftbank is involved with Lutnick's Cantor & Fitzgerald in crypto deals: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/cantor-nears-3-billion-crypto-venture-with-softbank-tether-ft-reports-2025-04-23/ https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/cantor-nears-... Masayoshi Son is BFF with Trump and Lutnick: https://asia.nikkei.com/politics/international-relations/how-howard-lutnick-and-masayoshi-son-put-japan-on-the-hook-for-550bn https://asia.nikkei.com/politics/international-relations/how... There is more going on here than is publicly known. Investing in hot air is of course a specialty of the Trump admin.
- janalsncm 1y agoShould we just take them at their word? All we know is that they sold all of their Nvidia.
- diamond559 1y agoThey don't see upside in Nvidia clearly or they wouldn't have completely sold out. If they don't think the risk/reward is worth it why should anyone else? Eventually you'll run out of greater fools.
- mulmen 1y agoYes because Softbank never makes mistakes clearly whatever they are doing is optimal.
- diamond559 1y agoSo are you going to buy Softbank's shares? You are running out of greater fools at these bubble prices.
- mulmen 11mo agoThe sarcasm didn’t come through. Sorry, I know better.
- thomassmith65 1y agoNvidia's market cap is only $5 trillion. California's residential real estate market is $10 trillion. All it would take for the stock to double is every last person in California selling their house and buying NVDA. /s
- creer 1y agoAs usual also "sold its entire stake" can be written as "investors eagerly bought SoftBank's entire stake of nvidia".
- downrightmike 1y agoBag holders gonna buy the bag
- jameslk 1y agoAlso relevant: > “This should not be seen, in our view, as a cautious or negative stance on Nvidia, but rather in the context of SoftBank needing at least $30.5bn of capital for investments in the Oct-Dec quarter, including $22.5bn for OpenAI and $6.5bn for Ampere > That amounts to “more in a single quarter than it has invested in aggregate over the two prior years combined,” Bulk said. > … Following the recapitalization and SoftBank’s $22.5 billion investment into the ChatGPT maker, the Japanese firm’s 4% ownership of OpenAI will increase to 11%. It sounds like Nvidia was played out for them and they’re aggressively trying to get in on OpenAI so they can exit sometime after retail investors get in
- lisbbb 1y agoBut they didn't think the Nvidia stake would make more $ otherwise they would still retain a percentage, right?