Nvidia antitrust investigation

[erek]

"Excluding the cloud providers' chips, Nvidia achieved nearly 100% market share. That domination helps the company report gross margins between 70% and 80%.
Warren, a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, expressed concerns about Nvidia's control of the market in a statement to Reuters.
"Allowing a single company to effectively be the gatekeeper for the world's AI future is dangerous and poses dire economic risks. The DOJ is right to investigate Nvidia's anticompetitive practices," she said.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice declined to comment.
Kanter said in an interview on CNBC on Friday, without discussing Nvidia specifically, that antitrust enforcers are concerned about areas where there are bottlenecks that companies could take advantage of to exclude rivals.
"We want a world where, one, there is room for investment and development and growth into new rivals and technologies," he said.
Last year, Reuters reported that investments in the semiconductor industry were down considerably in the face of Nvidia's overwhelming market share."

Source: https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-progressives-push-nvidia-antitrust-investigation-2024-08-01/

 

[Lakados]

It's unclear in these articles, but they aren't investigating Nvidia for illegal things they have done, they are investigating them for illegal things they may do.
Nvidia is now a Monopoly in every legal sense of the word, and its lead is so profound that no other company in its field can stand up to it.
Nvidia has a complete runaway lead and many governing bodies are aiming for their pound of flesh, Monopolies are bad and they desperately need there to be at least a duopoly so the powers that be need to find ways to "fine" Nvidia to fund one.

 

[vegeta535]

Sure Nvidia might have monopoly but it is not their fault that the competition can't keep up. There are a set choices out there still. Nvidia proves the entire package with the best hardware, software and support. None of that comes cheap.

 

[erek]

It's unclear in these articles, but they aren't investigating Nvidia for illegal things they have done, they are investigating them for illegal things they may do.

opinion?

 

[Lakados]

opinion?

No fact, it's the 3rd or 4th lawsuit opened up investigating them for this.

The final nail was the purchase of Run:ai when combined with the Nvidia stack it nearly doubles the efficiency of the Nvidia hardware.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/janaki...d-runai-partner-to-enhance-ai-infrastructure/

AMD and Intel were banking on Nvidia hardware shortages and their higher costs, so their market strategy was our product is in stock and 1/3'rd the price, why wait for them? buy two of ours save money and get the same output. But that's no longer feasible.
With Nvidia being nearly 2x more efficient now than it was even a month ago, AMD and Intel would need to cut their prices by at least 40% to even have a hope, and Nvidia supply will be greater than before as many projects now need far fewer devices to reach their intended output, or they can have just as many and get nearly double their intended output which makes the AMD and Intel product stack completely laughable. Because if you need 80,000 devices from AMD or Intel to get the same output as 10,000 Nvidia ones the electrical bill alone makes the project a waste of resources, let alone anything else.

 

[erek]

No fact, it's the 3rd or 4th lawsuit opened up investigating them for this.

The final nail was the purchase of Run:ai when combined with the Nvidia stack it nearly doubles the efficiency of the Nvidia hardware.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/janaki...d-runai-partner-to-enhance-ai-infrastructure/

AMD and Intel were banking on Nvidia hardware shortages and their higher costs, so their market strategy was our product is in stock and 1/3'rd the price, why wait for them? buy two of ours save money and get the same output. But that's no longer feasible.
With Nvidia being nearly 2x more efficient now than it was even a month ago, AMD and Intel would need to cut their prices by at least 40% to even have a hope, and Nvidia supply will be greater than before as many projects now need far fewer devices to reach their intended output, or they can have just as many and get nearly double their intended output which makes the AMD and Intel product stack completely laughable. Because if you need 80,000 devices from AMD or Intel to get the same output as 10,000 Nvidia ones the electrical bill alone makes the project a waste of resources, let alone anything else.

“NVIDIA Hit with DOJ Antitrust Probe over AI GPUs, Unfair Sales Tactics and Pricing Alleged​

by btarunr Today, 06:36 Discuss (17 Comments)
NVIDIA has reportedly been hit with a US Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust probe over the tactics the company allegedly employs to sell or lease its AI GPUs and data-center networking equipment, "The Information" reported. Shares of the NVIDIA stock fell 3.6% in the pre-market trading on Friday (08/02). The main complainants behind the probe appear to be a special interest group among the customers of AI GPUs, and not NVIDIA's competitors in the AI GPU industry per se. US Senator Elizabeth Warren and US progressives have been most vocal about calling upon the DOJ to investigate antitrust allegations against NVIDIA.“

 

[Armenius]

Sure Nvidia might have monopoly but it is not their fault that the competition can't keep up. There are a set choices out there still. Nvidia proves the entire package with the best hardware, software and support. None of that comes cheap.

Agreed. NVIDIA started investing in AI R&D more than a decade ago at this point, and the rest of the market either didn't care or dragged their feet. NVIDIA has such a commanding lead in the market due to the fact that they created it.

 

[Legendary Gamer]

“NVIDIA Hit with DOJ Antitrust Probe over AI GPUs, Unfair Sales Tactics and Pricing Alleged​

by btarunr Today, 06:36 Discuss (17 Comments)
NVIDIA has reportedly been hit with a US Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust probe over the tactics the company allegedly employs to sell or lease its AI GPUs and data-center networking equipment, "The Information" reported. Shares of the NVIDIA stock fell 3.6% in the pre-market trading on Friday (08/02). The main complainants behind the probe appear to be a special interest group among the customers of AI GPUs, and not NVIDIA's competitors in the AI GPU industry per se. US Senator Elizabeth Warren and US progressives have been most vocal about calling upon the DOJ to investigate antitrust allegations against NVIDIA.“

View attachment 669932

This is a joke. It's a waste of taxpayer money, a witch hunt led by a group of politicians that become less relevant every day.

Lets throw BILLIONS at Intel to increase their strangle hold on computing and then turn around and look into Nvidia and try stifle their growth, possibly, if they do anything illegal...

Funny, Nvidia is being investigated by a group of legislators that are more corrupt than the entire Venezuelan government...

 

[MacLeod]

Normally I'm never for an investigation like this and believe there can't really be a monopoly in a capitalist system....however a few weeks ago when one single bad update brought 75% of the world's businesses to a grinding halt, that made me kinda rethink things.

Maybe not so much punish Nvidia but rather coming up with a way ensuring most of the world doesn't rely on them for their very existence. I think it's way too dangerous for one company to be able to cripple a majority of the world's economy with just a keystroke.

 

[Legendary Gamer]

Agreed. NVIDIA started investing in AI R&D more than a decade ago at this point, and the rest of the market either didn't care or dragged their feet. NVIDIA has such a commanding lead in the market due to the fact that they created it.

Yes, they have never stopped innovating. They have some duds, occasionally, but Nvidia has been the go-to provider of top tier graphics in computing for a LONG TIME now. The market, back in the day had a number of competitors when 3D was emerging but most of them got crushed as their implementations weren't top tier or they just lacked the capital or management quality to succeed (3DFX).

ATI was decent but they could never quite keep up with Nvidia. No one could. Though competitors had their day but lacked the vision and leadership to truly succeed. AMD, in many respects is the only reason why ATI exists today in some capacity. Them being the choice of GPU for almost every console on the planet has allowed them to continue to exist. For a long time there, the acquisition of ATI nearly killed AMD and ATI. Sometimes I am amazed AMD survived. Without Lisa Su, AMD and the x64 Architecture would be a fond memory and the AMD x64 (x86_64) instruction set would be the only thing remaining of their legacy.

I hate the prices Nvidia charges, dislike their lack of transparency when they have a massive failure rate on GPUs... But they succeed with brute force and smart decisions. They stuck with DDR almost exclusively, when AMD was trying to sell underwhelming GPUs on HBM as a marketing point on bandwidth alone. Instead of trying to go new and cool, they went tried and true and kep their money on innovating the graphics Dies, not worrying about the memory architecture or the buzz around new stuff.

My opinion: AMD keeps making mistakes (they always adopt the latest tech before its even viable) like forcing big changes in PCIE and the expenses .... Jesus... PCIE4 was barely utilized before 5.0 was already out and, unnecessary in all but the highest level datacenter applications. Eventually, everyone would be there. But the performance between a PCIE4 and 5 GPU is nothing. Theoretical data on memory based storage is crazy faster but end users will never benefit from that. Hell, at home I have trouble sustaining 5 Gigabit transfers between devices that are supposed to be able to handle 10. I think my RAID array sits just below 5Gig speeds and there isn't enough cache memory on the planet to sustain a m.2 to m.2 4,000 to 7,000 meg transfer.

This is a stupid legal inquiry

 

[Legendary Gamer]

Normally I'm never for an investigation like this and believe there can't really be a monopoly in a capitalist system....however a few weeks ago when one single bad update brought 75% of the world's businesses to a grinding halt, that made me kinda rethink things.

Maybe not so much punish Nvidia but rather coming up with a way ensuring most of the world doesn't rely on them for their very existence. I think it's way too dangerous for one company to be able to cripple a majority of the world's economy with just a keystroke.

You can use the competition for most things, but in AI ... the others haven't been innovating and forward thinking. Nvidia, as much as I believe they're an "evil" empire ... is a business that is well run at the end of the day. They are doing what they need to do to succeed.

How does a bad patch from Crowdstrike equate to breaking up Nvidia? Seriously, there were other companies that didn't use Crowdstrike and were unaffected. Anyone not employing O365 was largely unaffected.

It all comes down to consumer choice and the types of applications these products will be used in. It was inevitable that there would be "losers" in the development of efficient AI hardware. The competitors may never gain a foothold in these areas. Maybe they (AMD and Intel and others) are relegated to the budget bin for AI workloads. Shit happens. Doesn't mean Nvidia will put AMD or Intel out of business. It just means, if they (AMD and Intel) want to compete they have to buy a startup that is massively more efficient or innovate more themselves.

 

[Gideon]

Will see if anything comes of this investigation. But honestly this AI bubble is going to pop soon as companies are struggling to find a financial return on it, as the cost of the hardware is extreme.

 

[Legendary Gamer]

Will see if anything comes of this investigation. But honestly this AI bubble is going to pop soon as companies are struggling to find a financial return on it, as the cost of the hardware is extreme.

Right. The AI thing is gonna all die down eventually. Did you see the utterly stupid marketing every vendor is doing now. They are slapping "AI" on the front of all their products from m.2 drives to beer coolies... So much money is being dumped into marketing to sell products to the "uneducated" masses... I am certain there are people out there that will see an AI Toaster Oven and have to have it, just because it's got some sort of artificial intelligence... when in fact all that equates to is a touch screen and a pressure sensor for when you insert the food tray...

 

[MacLeod]

You can use the competition for most things, but in AI ... the others haven't been innovating and forward thinking. Nvidia, as much as I believe they're an "evil" empire ... is a business that is well run at the end of the day. They are doing what they need to do to succeed.

How does a bad patch from Crowdstrike equate to breaking up Nvidia? Seriously, there were other companies that didn't use Crowdstrike and were unaffected. Anyone not employing O365 was largely unaffected.

It all comes down to consumer choice and the types of applications these products will be used in. It was inevitable that there would be "losers" in the development of efficient AI hardware. The competitors may never gain a foothold in these areas. Maybe they (AMD and Intel and others) are relegated to the budget bin for AI workloads. Shit happens. Doesn't mean Nvidia will put AMD or Intel out of business. It just means, if they (AMD and Intel) want to compete they have to buy a startup that is massively more efficient or innovate more themselves.

Who said we should break up Nvidia because of Crowdstrike?

All I'm saying is I think it's a problem when one company offers an essential service to 3/4 of the world's businesses and can disable them and bring them all to a screeching halt with a single bad update. I don't want to break up companies but there has to be some safeguards we could put in place to where Nvidia can't send out a line of code and all the banks, hospitals and airlines in the world shut down for 2 days.

 

[erek]

This is a joke. It's a waste of taxpayer money, a witch hunt led by a group of politicians that become less relevant every day.

Lets throw BILLIONS at Intel to increase their strangle hold on computing and then turn around and look into Nvidia and try stifle their growth, possibly, if they do anything illegal...

Funny, Nvidia is being investigated by a group of legislators that are more corrupt than the entire Venezuelan government...

It’s always the tax payers that pay

https://hardforum.com/threads/globa...ke-update-definitions.2035975/post-1045928095

 

[Legendary Gamer]

Who said we should break up Nvidia because of Crowdstrike?

All I'm saying is I think it's a problem when one company offers an essential service to 3/4 of the world's businesses and can disable them and bring them all to a screeching halt with a single bad update. I don't want to break up companies but there has to be some safeguards we could put in place to where Nvidia can't send out a line of code and all the banks, hospitals and airlines in the world shut down for 2 days.

Again, what I was wondering if why Crowdstrike made you think that. The current inquiry is a farce, its Elizabeth Warren hoping Nvidia will slide her some hush money under the table. She's more corrupt than Satan...

Crowdstrike is a security platform that has it's fingers in the OS Kernel. Nvidia is selling GPUs and AI accelerators, they do tend to release bad code sometimes but it usually means games crash on you.
What I'm saying here is that it's unlikely that Nvidia's software updates will cripple most PCs out there. Most business class machines and servers are running on GPUs that aren't Nvidia. Servers are largely headless and workstations are driven by AMD or Intel graphics on their CPUs.

Someone launching malicious code that nukes an Nvidia Cluster and takes out Chat GPT or some other neural modeling system.... Who gives a fuck? Honestly, if that happened, all of us would have more job security because without AI we all have jobs.

Now, if AI replaces airline Pilots and drone operators and we start producing Terminators... Then, yeah, there better be fail safes and backup biologicals that can terminate the code and step in. But I don't think we're anywhere near Skynet yet.

 

[Lakados]

Hell, at home I have trouble sustaining 5 Gigabit transfers between devices that are supposed to be able to handle 10. I think my RAID array sits just below 5Gig speeds and there isn't enough cache memory on the planet to sustain a m.2 to m.2 4,000 to 7,000 meg transfer.

I’ve said this many times in other threads but 5gb Ethernet is a joke, it’s so easy to interfere with due to conflicting standards and cable types that it’s virtually worthless unless you live in a clean room. A cheap fridge in an adjacent room can mess that up on a given day.

 

[LukeTbk]

Nvidia is now a Monopoly in every legal sense of the word, and its lead is so profound that no other company in its field can stand up to it.

The outside cloud provider chips part of the statement is a rather large one too, for example this:
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/...googles-tpus-for-ai-opts-out-of-nvidia-chips/

Does not make Nvidia feel that much as having a monopoly to train your models, Apple will have its own custom silicon like all the other big player soon and use google tpu right now.

On the giant player it is not really a monopoly and on the regular customer size neither, what an simple macbook pro with an Apple M6 max soc with the most ram option will be able to do at the customer level will probably be impressive. Models will run on simple phone, without any Nvidia hardware. There is a middle ground where they are.

There is something to be done about CUDA here I would imagine, but with those types of margins at those revenues level, if no government do nothing the competition will be giant (and already kind of is when your competition is Amazon-Microsoft-Facebook-Google-Apple-Tesla, they do not necessarily need state intervention) it is just impossible in a free capitalist market to sustain that kind, you need regulation (of the type AI is dangerous !! you need to test AI chips in a sandbox and get it stamped) that push people out to do it.

 

[Legendary Gamer]

I’ve said this many times in other threads but 5gb Ethernet is a joke, it’s so easy to interfere with due to conflicting standards and cable types that it’s virtually worthless unless you live in a clean room. A cheap fridge in an adjacent room can mess that up on a given day.

Well, that's not the problem I have with it. I'm running 5-10Gig NICs on all my computers. It's maintaining the transfer speeds. Not much out there will sustain speeds past 5 Gigs unless you're rocking a 10 Disk RAID array on a pretty hefty controller. The drives we have in our machines can't sustain anything beyond burst transfers. I have tested m.2 to m.2 and I never saw anywhere near peak speeds, you typically see them burst to max and then drop to a a fifth or tenth of their rated transfer rates.

 

[LukeTbk]

opinion?

That what those anti-trust often are now, preventing future issues, which is not totally devoid of sense but can be an overreaction to the feeling of having been too late on regulating social media and not wanting for something like that to happen again.

For all things AI they change so fast that no one could be particularly good at coming up with some regulation here and could be dangerous to impair progress, having let Internet to be a complete wild west and even shield website from lawsuit with section 230 for a long time gave us quite the innovation.

Not so long ago Facebook-google was arguably the biggest duopoly at a worldwide scale in human history and about something quite important; online ads, with over 90% of new digital ads going through them and before state had time to break it, it stopped to be a duopoly, now uber-tiktok-disney-netflix and many others entered the market and more importantly Amazon could become bigger than Facebook soon in that space, they already did in the US market.

Tech at the moment has many not only giant player, but extremely well run and dynamic companies, the Apple-Google-Tesla-Meta of the world if they need AI silicon and Nvidia being a monopoly is a big issue, can came up with alternative and do. AI is the complete opposite of a static, non-dynamic market because it is stifled by a monopoly and lacking innovation in that space:

Not sure if it make the top 1000 of the commercial sector that would need goverment innovation to ramp up and speed up innovation and the annual gain of value for the customer... price for a significantly better product are going down at a like 6x a year rate.

 

[Lakados]

Well, that's not the problem I have with it. I'm running 5-10Gig NICs on all my computers. It's maintaining the transfer speeds. Not much out there will sustain speeds past 5 Gigs unless you're rocking a 10 Disk RAID array on a pretty hefty controller. The drives we have in our machines can't sustain anything beyond burst transfers. I have tested m.2 to m.2 and I never saw anywhere near peak speeds, you typically see them burst to max and then drop to a a fifth or tenth of their rated transfer rates.

In my case, every time AC kicks in or the air handlers they put off enough noise anything that was 5 drops down to 1, unless they are solid cat6e, not stranded at which they may maintain 5 but still likely drop to half-duplex.

But when it happens it briefly disconnects while it renegotiates and that drop would screw up some of the SQL apps. So we just set them to 1 regardless.

We’ve started replacing the needed ones with 10GB over OAM4 multi-mode. It’s cheaper overall.

 

[LodeRunner]

Well, that's not the problem I have with it. I'm running 5-10Gig NICs on all my computers. It's maintaining the transfer speeds. Not much out there will sustain speeds past 5 Gigs unless you're rocking a 10 Disk RAID array on a pretty hefty controller. The drives we have in our machines can't sustain anything beyond burst transfers. I have tested m.2 to m.2 and I never saw anywhere near peak speeds, you typically see them burst to max and then drop to a a fifth or tenth of their rated transfer rates.

Transfers between NVMe clients on my network will saturate 10Gb easy. And that's moving files larger than system RAM, so not just cache transfers. The NVMe cards backing my VSAN setup can hit ~75% max throughput on the 40 Gb network. If your (presumably NVMe) SSD is struggling to maintain 500 MByte/s throughput then maybe you've got a SSD where they played games with DRAM caching to make slow flash look better, a slow controller, or thermal throttling. One of my NVMe drives unfortunately sits under my GPU and it'll drop from 2-3 GByte/s down to ~700 MByte/s as it heats up. My SSDs are MLC or TLC; no SLC types and I actively avoid QLC.

 

[Legendary Gamer]

In my case, every time AC kicks in or the air handlers they put off enough noise anything that was 5 drops down to 1, unless they are solid cat6e, not stranded at which they may maintain 5 but still likely drop to half-duplex.

But when it happens it briefly disconnects while it renegotiates and that drop would screw up some of the SQL apps. So we just set them to 1 regardless.

We’ve started replacing the needed ones with 10GB over OAM4 multi-mode. It’s cheaper overall.

Honestly, I don't think I need fiber in my house... That's some serious stuff. It will handle 40/100G Networking. I guess that's one way to future proof!

 

[Legendary Gamer]

And here I thought I was a badass running Cat 7, 5 years ago... Ultimately Cat 7 was so hard to work with I ran Cat6 to most of my rooms. Cat 7 between the cable inflexibility and the nightmare fuel terminations was not fun. I only ran a couple lines in my house with it.

 

[LodeRunner]

I had to pull new cable anyway and I have long tired of terminating my own CAT-5e/6a cables. The fiber switches I use I got on eBay for cheap, as such things go ($300 for a ICX7450 fully loaded and $350 for the Arista 32x 40 Gb switch; some of the 40 G ports breakout to 4x10. So systems that had space for new NICs got old Mellanox 10G CX3 cards and fiber and transceivers aren't hugely expensive from fs.com. Yes, more than 2.5/5 and copper cable, but at the time I made that decision, 2.5/5G switches were still quite new, and a lot more expensive for fewer ports.

My next go around will be used 100G gear with bi-directional transceivers so I don't have to pull new fiber.

 

[Legendary Gamer]

I had to pull new cable anyway and I have long tired of terminating my own CAT-5e/6a cables. The fiber switches I use I got on eBay for cheap, as such things go ($300 for a ICX7450 fully loaded and $350 for the Arista 32x 40 Gb switch; some of the 40 G ports breakout to 4x10. So systems that had space for new NICs got old Mellanox 10G CX3 cards and fiber and transceivers aren't hugely expensive from fs.com. Yes, more than 2.5/5 and copper cable, but at the time I made that decision, 2.5/5G switches were still quite new, and a lot more expensive for fewer ports.

My next go around will be used 100G gear with bi-directional transceivers so I don't have to pull new fiber.

I think I'm too old for all that work. I have zero desire to pull anything under my house again. I will just have to make due with whatever archaic shit I have pushing 5/10G network speeds. Lol

I looked at the Mellanox stuff when I was wiring my house. I ultimately didn't think I required fiber and a lot of that stuff had cable limitations IIRC but probably less so with a fiber switch, I think the cable limits were from PC to PC. Not PC to switch

You do you.

 

[Legendary Gamer]

This is what I was looking for. Now the majority of the CHIPS act may have gone to TSMC or other companies... but a nice slice of about 8.5 Billion Dollars went to intel
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/intel-massive-job-cuts-come-021511283.html

Intel is a garbage company. We all thought they were turning over a new leaf and turning shit around... What a joke. They are infected with corporate rot at the highest levels.

Good ole Pat Gelsinger even managed to give himself something like a 4 million dollar raise in the same span of time that he's laying off 17% of his global workforce. The same time they have zero transparency and are attempting to be scummy and avoid the blame for 13th and 14th Gen chip failures and we, the consumers, are largely stuck wondering when our processors will suddenly die and if it will be out of warranty.

AMD likely didn't mean to delay their latest generation of processors... but they come across, inadvertently, looking like a upstanding company that isn't willing to release broken garbage on their customer base. Whether or not their new gen is flawless remains to be seen, but the public image and black eyes for Intell keep on rolling.

The kind of resolution I expect from Intel is "Hey, my shit is broken because you sold me faulty shit. How about you swap it with a 12900K or KS and lets call it a day?" That will never happen, I will be out of pocket for something I know I won't have to worry about... It's Intel today, tomorrow, it might AMD.

Ugh

 

[Lakados]

This is what I was looking for. Now the majority of the CHIPS act may have gone to TSMC or other companies... but a nice slice of about 8.5 Billion Dollars went to intel
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/intel-massive-job-cuts-come-021511283.html

Intel is a garbage company. We all thought they were turning over a new leaf and turning shit around... What a joke. They are infected with corporate rot at the highest levels.

Good ole Pat Gelsinger even managed to give himself something like a 4 million dollar raise in the same span of time that he's laying off 17% of his global workforce. The same time they have zero transparency and are attempting to be scummy and avoid the blame for 13th and 14th Gen chip failures and we, the consumers, are largely stuck wondering when our processors will suddenly die and if it will be out of warranty.

AMD likely didn't mean to delay their latest generation of processors... but they come across, inadvertently, looking like a upstanding company that isn't willing to release broken garbage on their customer base. Whether or not their new gen is flawless remains to be seen, but the public image and black eyes for Intell keep on rolling.

The kind of resolution I expect from Intel is "Hey, my shit is broken because you sold me faulty shit. How about you swap it with a 12900K or KS and lets call it a day?" That will never happen, I will be out of pocket for something I know I won't have to worry about... It's Intel today, tomorrow, it might AMD.

Ugh

The chips act was to bring manufacturing facilities to the US, which Intel did… so far they are the only company that received money that has succeeded in doing what the CHIPS act mandated… garbage or not they managed to fulfil the request.

 

[sc5mu93]

For those who think this is a waste, I think you have missed the point. The FTC/DOJ aren't looking into Nvidia because they are successful. They are looking at Nvidia because they are abusing their market position. Think product bundling (e.g. in order to get desired product you MUST buy non-desired product as well), exclusionary agreements, required pre-orders, etc. Some of these, if true, clearly cross the line into antitrust.

Given history of Nvidia (GPP) it sounds like Nvidia playing to historical form. Investigate away. Let the truth come out.

 

[Legendary Gamer]

The chips act was to bring manufacturing facilities to the US, which Intel did… so far they are the only company that received money that has succeeded in doing what the CHIPS act mandated… garbage or not they managed to fulfil the request.

Sure they did, by contracting TSMC to fab their processors in Taiwan. Maybe domestically if TSMC ever gets their fabs running here. Intel, theoretically, should have dumped that money into fixing their broken ass fabs keeping their workforce employed...

Honestly, Intel is a poor investment. They have had issues with every node since 22nm, IIRC. Their yields are way off their promises and even their 7nm and newer processes are having issues. I don't know what they did with that money... But I can guess, the rich at that company got richer. Global Foundries only got 1.5 Billion in aid, to put things in perspective, GF is the third largest Semiconductor company in the world.

It all sounds corrupt and broken to me... Intel, the company with deeper pockets than god himself got a bigger chunk of the money. GF has 2 plants in the US that really need to be updated. Their best process is 12LP+ comparable OR BETTER than 10nm (which is hilarious because Intel still has yield problems on their 10nm).

 

[LukeTbk]

The chips act was to bring manufacturing facilities to the US, which Intel did… so far they are the only company that received money that has succeeded in doing what the CHIPS act mandated… garbage or not they managed to fulfil the request.

I really doubt they were the only one, all those companies would have had a department trying to get a taste.

TSMC got 6.6 billions direct funding and 5 billions in really good loans, for the Arizona project, despite the project already started before the CHIPS act was enacted, I imagine they added another factory to the project.

Samsung,Qualcomm, Globalfoundries all got money.

 

[Lakados]

Sure they did, by contracting TSMC to fab their processors in Taiwan. Maybe domestically if TSMC ever gets their fabs running here. Intel, theoretically, should have dumped that money into fixing their broken ass fabs keeping their workforce employed...

Honestly, Intel is a poor investment. They have had issues with every node since 22nm, IIRC. Their yields are way off their promises and even their 7nm and newer processes are having issues. I don't know what they did with that money... But I can guess, the rich at that company got richer. Global Foundries only got 1.5 Billion in aid, to put things in perspective, GF is the third largest Semiconductor company in the world.

It all sounds corrupt and broken to me... Intel, the company with deeper pockets than god himself got a bigger chunk of the money. GF has 2 plants in the US that really need to be updated. Their best process is 12LP+ comparable OR BETTER than 10nm (which is hilarious because Intel still has yield problems on their 10nm).

They are fabbing parts of their consumer laptop parts at TSMC, the Xeons are all being made at the new facilities. Intel 3 looks to be an actually good node. Intel build 3 facilities for that node and they are at capacity. They also used the money to build the 3 other factories that will be doing 2nm and 1.8nm.

You realize of course Intel has 6 new fab plants under construction right now.

 

[Gideon]

They are fabbing parts of their consumer laptop parts at TSMC, the Xeons are all being made at the new facilities. Intel 3 looks to be an actually good node. Intel build 3 facilities for that node and they are at capacity. They also used the money to build the 3 other factories that will be doing 2nm and 1.8nm.

You realize of course Intel has 6 new fab plants under construction right now.

They could have twenty new fabs, if the chips are as flawed as they currently are from Intel, it wont matter.

 

[Legendary Gamer]

They are fabbing parts of their consumer laptop parts at TSMC, the Xeons are all being made at the new facilities. Intel 3 looks to be an actually good node. Intel build 3 facilities for that node and they are at capacity. They also used the money to build the 3 other factories that will be doing 2nm and 1.8nm.

You realize of course Intel has 6 new fab plants under construction right now.

Good for them. i had heard that they were having yield issues with their new fab. I was from an article so I didn't pull that out of my ass.

The problem is that we gave money (Taxpayer dollars) to a company that didn't need it to begin with.

Intel has a track record of cutting corners and releasing products that beat the competition but fall behind after you plug in all the holes in the architecture.

"However, it appears that Intel is spending more on manufacturing Meteor Lake chips than expected, lowering its margins. Moor Insights & Strategy analyst Patrick Moorhead said Intel appears to have a yield issue, meaning it is producing more defective chips than expected, in a post on social media site X.3 days ago"

https://www.barrons.com/articles/intel-stock-chips-amd-qualcomm-tsmc-56db0a30

Intel hasn't gotten the money yet... That's good.

https://www.techpowerup.com/325157/...es-company-running-hot-lots-to-satisfy-demand

Anyway, we should probably get back on topic...

 

[LukeTbk]

The problem is that we gave money (Taxpayer dollars) to a company that didn't need it to begin with.

Not sure if they did not, if people want them to inshore advanced node production in the US because it is a strategic value (say finding crew in the US is enough of an issue that you need to convince them), but would a near 60 years old giant company actually needed it, not necessarily a good use of capital...

One big issue is that the advanced nodes supply chain is so complex (Dutch EUV machines, japan-korea photomask, etc...), that all in-shoring it seem really complicated, you can have the final high profil actual fab in the US, but you still have giant amount of the supply chain all around the world. And if you put a giant tarrif on import to make them inshore all the chain, you go into a rough window where US made chips cost much more than those made in taiwan-japan-corea-etc...

 

[Lakados]

I really doubt this, all those company would have had a departement trying to get a taste.

TSMC got 6.6 billions direct funding and 5 billions in really good loans, for the Arizona project, despite the project already started before the CHIPS act was enacted, I imagine they added another factory to the project.

Samsung,Qualcomm, Globalfoundries all got money.

This is what they said in the bill.

Signed into law in August 2022, the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act is intended to lure microchip manufacturing back to the United States after several decades of individual companies offshoring the technology.

When the sanctions against China kicked in suddenly the US military and their contractors found they could no longer get parts for military equipment such as radars and radios. They had to stop using many of the components they were using and switch over to far more costly and much less efficient FPGA’s meanwhile the Chinese military suddenly got freed up access to a stolen TSMC 7nm process via SMIC.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/c...m-process-is-reportedly-copied-from-tsmc-tech

So the sanctions the US placed on China meant to stifle their military and intelligence operations instead hindered the US military and actively benefitted the Chinese military because it damaged a critical supply line of electronic components.

CHIPS was brought in shortly after in response once they realized how fucked the electronic manufacturing and distribution chains actually were.

 

[Lakados]

They could have twenty new fabs, if the chips are as flawed as they currently are from Intel, it wont matter.

Which is why I’m glad Intel is spinning off their fabs, I’ve said previously that once they are separated the fab side will be worth more than the x86 side and that the only thing that’s changed is by how much. Because at this rate the design side is going to be worth fuck all of nothing.