Can someone explain to me how Nvidia chooses who they sell chips to. As far as I can tell there are dozens of companies out there trying to build out these data centres; all frontier labs to some extent, all the hyperscalers, the neoclouds. The demand for Nvidia chips outstrips supply by a decent margin. There must be so much that goes into this - the commitment from musk to exclusively use Nvidia, the weird equity deals, etc. For example, is Google just completely unable to buy GPUs at this point because Nvidia sees the TPU as a threat?
Do they choose? It’s just a standard enterprise hardware deal afaik. You go through an oem like supermicro/dell/hp unless you’re huge and somehow want to be an oem to yourself. To choose to be sold to is ultimately about being willing to spend the money. And you can negotiate more the more you buy. But nothing is special there.
AFAIK obviously and I have never bought something that large but friends have spoken to them about doing this and it’s just a matter of paying.
Well clearly they choose, there's more demand for their GPUs than there is supply, so they have to decide somehow and the fact that the announcement of these deals frequently come with a plethora of weird funding/loan/guaranteed demand/exclusivity/bunlding, shows they're doing a lot more than just running a simple bidding process.
That’s just seller financing. Apple offers it on iPhones. They give you the money to buy the phone and then you pay it monthly instead. Exists in many places. You can buy acres of land that way too.
What makes you think Google is unable to buy Nvidia GPUs? They buy tons of them for their cloud infrastructure. Nvidia will sell to anybody with the money to pay.
Can someone explain to me how Nvidia chooses who they sell chips to. As far as I can tell there are dozens of companies out there trying to build out these data centres; all frontier labs to some extent, all the hyperscalers, the neoclouds. The demand for Nvidia chips outstrips supply by a decent margin. There must be so much that goes into this - the commitment from musk to exclusively use Nvidia, the weird equity deals, etc. For example, is Google just completely unable to buy GPUs at this point because Nvidia sees the TPU as a threat?
Do they choose? It’s just a standard enterprise hardware deal afaik. You go through an oem like supermicro/dell/hp unless you’re huge and somehow want to be an oem to yourself. To choose to be sold to is ultimately about being willing to spend the money. And you can negotiate more the more you buy. But nothing is special there.
AFAIK obviously and I have never bought something that large but friends have spoken to them about doing this and it’s just a matter of paying.
Well clearly they choose, there's more demand for their GPUs than there is supply, so they have to decide somehow and the fact that the announcement of these deals frequently come with a plethora of weird funding/loan/guaranteed demand/exclusivity/bunlding, shows they're doing a lot more than just running a simple bidding process.
He's talking about the circular financing part of these deals. None of them are paying cash up front.
That’s just seller financing. Apple offers it on iPhones. They give you the money to buy the phone and then you pay it monthly instead. Exists in many places. You can buy acres of land that way too.
What makes you think Google is unable to buy Nvidia GPUs? They buy tons of them for their cloud infrastructure. Nvidia will sell to anybody with the money to pay.
spacex the AI company, right?
I thought it's a social media company...
Nah, it's a taxi company.
I thought it was a robotics company?
NO! It is about payments and the "everything app", as Musk said :-D
They're building a space garage or something.
I think it’s a Sci Fi LARPing company
Well it's definitely not a boring company. Anymore.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49322519