Hence the mention of "individual". Blackrock, Vanguard etc. don't own the shares themselves, but rather manage mutual funds/index funds/ETFs that millions of people participate in.
Otherwise these few companies are the largest holders of basically every security in existence.
A company can own lots of things (assets, IP, real estate, share of other companies), but shareholders of the company don't own or have direct access to that thing. If Intel pays dividends, it will go to Nvidia, not you. If Intel holds a shareholder vote, Nvidia leadership will be the one voting, and they don't have to listen to your opinion. They can also change or sell the holding without your permission.
If you own shares of Intel through a Vanguard fund, you do have actual ownership of Intel. You can cast a vote same as every other shareholder. The dividend they issue will be passed on to you. Vanguard is simply acting as a proxy.
Don’t disagree. I think the point I’m trying to make is that the idea of “individual investor” captures a range of attributes, but some of which are also shared by non-individuals or are not shared with “individual humans”.
So I generally think wha is more useful is saying in what particular ways “individual investor” is meant when it is used in debate, decision-making, etc.
BlackRock Investment Stewardship (BIS) team votes even in the name of ETF holders who don't specify their preferences. There are plenty of controversies after reviews of their voting like "voted against a record 91% of all shareholder proposals — and against 93% of those focused on environmental and social issues" (2023). That's from the 2nd result in a simple web search.
Why is that controversial? Is it expected that the majority of shareholder proposals would be things that you would be criticized for not voting for? It's a bit like saying that someone voted against 91% of bills in congress. That could be good if they were bad bills!
It just occurred to me that "East India Company" is very close to "East Nvidia Company". If only we had made warmongering more "socially acceptable"[1] earlier, Mr. Huang might've already employed a private military too.
How long until NVIDIA realises that they have a larger budget for military protection of Taiwan than the US Government and takes matters into their own hands?
I'm willing to be convinced different, but I think it would be better if companies had to be owned by a person or people ie that companies can't own companies.
It seems a layer of indirection that is more harmful than useful.
As somebody who really appreciates being able to own a ton of different companies in small amounts in my retirement account, I'm not sure if this is the right way to solve the problem.
Requiring full disclosure of all ownership stakes, traceable back to individuals, is probably a better route for this.
And it seems that there's a trend towards that, last company I registered had a new process for listing beneficial ownership of all significant amounts. Just need to push that legislation further.
> We limit liability for risky ventures for a reason.
Because the investor class had the political powers to get that protection written into law for themselves, so as to externalize risks while privatizing rewards.
It's inefficient in the case of a wholly-owned subsidiary to require company A's shareholders to hire lawyers, setup bank accounts, books, etc. for a separate company B which ultimately provides the same limited liability vis-a-vis third parties. Joint-ventures become tricky between corporations. Corporations can't hold potentially toxic assets. There are quite a few good ones. Interesting nonetheless.
Also as with all corporate law questions, <other jurisdiction> allows it, so we'll just go there instead.
What you say is a bit dismissive of where Intel currently is. They are maybe a year behind TSMC and have been "printing" EUV in high volume since 2023 and shipping it in high volume since 2024.
Their latest node 18A is already in production and should be a lot closer to TSMC's latest and greatest, with the first products shipping early next year.
You need an army of wizards who are willing to do, for the most part, lab-tech work for lab-tech salary while having a graduate degree in relevant field
How much money are those wizards making that Nvidia can't easily afford to both 1. pay them to come fix Intel's problems for a while, and also 2. pay TSMC to rescind their non-competes to enable them to do that?
Get a PhD in some kind of esoteric field like chemical kinetics and then spend a decade learning about oxide surface conditioning under someone who spent their life working on it.
None of this stuff is published (externally) and there are no discussion forums or stack overflows to help you either. You need to get through academia, prove yourself, and then you can start working on a chance to get access to the trade secrets that make it possible.
After all that you will be placed as a researcher on a handful of steps in the multi-thousand step process of making SOTA wafers. And probably not make crazy money, but at this point, you're not in it for the money anyway.
Unlikely to pass anti trust, they failed already acquiring ARM back in time.
Edit: I see a lot of confusion on the topic. The anti trust does not need to be from US to be essentially binding, UK, EU, etc have also a de facto veto on mergers of global companies, even if those are US based, this is especially true in global sectors like semiconductors where everybody depends on everybody else from patents to machinery.
I don't think that's allowed under the terms of the x86/x86_64 cross-license deal with AMD.
That's why, for example, any meaningful collaboration between Intel and Nvidia under this partnership has to be released in the form of an Intel product using Nvidia tech, rather than an Nvidia product using Intel tech.
What I find somewhat humorous: AMD originally wanted to acquire Nvidia, but walked away when Jensen apparently insisted on becoming the CEO of the merged company.
I wonder how AMD would have fared against Intel post-Conroe if Jensen was CEO. They were behind but still competitive until the Bulldozer flop, only recovering with Zen (and even then it took a few generations for Zen to mature).
> only recovering with Zen (and even then it took a few generations for Zen to mature).
Zen was a beast from day one. Zen 1 more or less matched Intel on single-core perf and outmatched it on multicore. Zen 1 blew Intel out of water on perf/$, so much so that the morning after booting up my Zen 1 computer, I bought as many AMD shares as I could afford.
Zen1 was further behind in ST perf than Intel is today in it's desktop offerings. They really exploited their strength in MT and price, and showed that the market was already chafing under Intel's reluctance to go beyond 4 cores on their consumer line, presumably to avoid stepping on the toes of HEDT. But that just caused the competition to pretty much invalidate that entire line instead.
And I don't really see the situation being that obviously different if it was Nvidia who they merged with and Jensen was CEO.
The big issue was simply that AMD didn't have the cash at hand to both pay for ATI and maintain investment in R&D, at least without their next few products completely dominating the competition. I don't see a different CEO changing that. Unless Jensen was willing to value Nvidia significantly less than ATI at the time.
"De facto" is the keyword there. Only the nation of origin has any say on company management and infrastructure in a de jure manner. The only power non-origin nations/entities have is via leveraging their ability to do business in the region and/or their local holdings.
Different country (UK vs US) + different administration might change the results. Who said you can't just try the same thing over and over again until it works?
Once again I am reminded of the circular nature of money flowing around in this economy. Michael Burry even commented on this, citing it as rhyming like other economic failures previously.
We should all be worried. When a company invests in it's customers it is extra exposed to the risk of that customer going under. If OpenAI fails, Nvidia loses sales and loses the money it invested in OpenAI.
I imagine it's a similar story. If Intel fails, Nvidia loses sales and this investment.
Yes exactly, not sure why I'm being downvoted, other replies are talking about general economic money velocity as if that's somehow relevant to this specific case.
This dig at the relationships between these companies also seems odd to me. Isn't this fairly normal practice for companies within an industry? There are lots of examples of joint ventures, partnerships, alliances, investment and mergers and acquisitions between lots of other corporations that are in competition with each other. I don't see how it could be otherwise unless each corporation was entirely vertically integrated so that they never had to work with any other.
This is a much tighter circle than any of us should be comfortable with. There are some horrible examples of companies investing in their costumers and then losing big when those customers fail.
The problem is that there is all this capital and no place to put it, so yes it seems circular, but some of that is to be expected.
As for Burry, he recently called out the changes to how the big players are amortizing their capital expenses for all these data center build outs. He is correct in calling it out, but he's getting the wrong signal from it. Mores law died a long time ago, and now were basically hitting multiple walls at the same time: Node scaling at the chip fabs, power and cooling in the data center, and just more linear growth from product (because of all three factors).
Go back to 2008 ish time period. There were a lot of data centers that hit the wall with availability of power and cooling and they were hard problems to solve then. The solution was not to upgrade rather to "build new", and were seeing a lot of the same types of issues today.
Nvidia has unmaintainable margins, the memory manufacturing side is now in on the grift too... They are sucking up the profit while they can because the dip is going to be BRUTAL (likely a boon to consumers but neither here nor there).
1. US Government
2. Nvidia
3. Softbank
Interesting turn of events for the company...
> 1. US Government
> 2. Nvidia
> 3. Softbank
Not quite. (1) US Govt at 9.9% (2) BlackRock at 8.4% (3) Vanguard at 8.3% (4) State Street Corp probably (5) Nvidia (6) Softbank at 2%
Otherwise these few companies are the largest holders of basically every security in existence.
> Otherwise these few companies are the largest holders of basically every security in existence.
Indeed. Due to inclusion of Intel in S&P500 index funds and ETFs.
Together, institutional investors own over 50% of Intel Corporation, giving them a significant collective influence on major board decisions. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/67-institutional-ownership-in...
A company can own lots of things (assets, IP, real estate, share of other companies), but shareholders of the company don't own or have direct access to that thing. If Intel pays dividends, it will go to Nvidia, not you. If Intel holds a shareholder vote, Nvidia leadership will be the one voting, and they don't have to listen to your opinion. They can also change or sell the holding without your permission.
If you own shares of Intel through a Vanguard fund, you do have actual ownership of Intel. You can cast a vote same as every other shareholder. The dividend they issue will be passed on to you. Vanguard is simply acting as a proxy.
So I generally think wha is more useful is saying in what particular ways “individual investor” is meant when it is used in debate, decision-making, etc.
The individual human called Citizens United is casting a side eye.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/s5TkOj2E5MA
“The chips must flow…”
It seems a layer of indirection that is more harmful than useful.
Requiring full disclosure of all ownership stakes, traceable back to individuals, is probably a better route for this.
And it seems that there's a trend towards that, last company I registered had a new process for listing beneficial ownership of all significant amounts. Just need to push that legislation further.
We limit liability for risky ventures for a reason.
Because the investor class had the political powers to get that protection written into law for themselves, so as to externalize risks while privatizing rewards.
Edit: sorry, that was very abrupt! Nice to have your input. I would be interested to hear what you think would be problematic about the Idea.
Also as with all corporate law questions, <other jurisdiction> allows it, so we'll just go there instead.
When culture stinks nothing else matters.
Better start fresh and hope for the best. In fact with how much money Nvidia has, better start fresh 20 times over and pick the winner from those.
Intel needs expertise that only a few hundred people on Earth have, and most of them are in Taiwan, already working for someone else.
You don't just buy an EUV and start printing, you buy an EUV and give it to a wizard to use as a wand. Intel needs wizards.
Their latest node 18A is already in production and should be a lot closer to TSMC's latest and greatest, with the first products shipping early next year.
None of this stuff is published (externally) and there are no discussion forums or stack overflows to help you either. You need to get through academia, prove yourself, and then you can start working on a chance to get access to the trade secrets that make it possible.
After all that you will be placed as a researcher on a handful of steps in the multi-thousand step process of making SOTA wafers. And probably not make crazy money, but at this point, you're not in it for the money anyway.
Edit: I see a lot of confusion on the topic. The anti trust does not need to be from US to be essentially binding, UK, EU, etc have also a de facto veto on mergers of global companies, even if those are US based, this is especially true in global sectors like semiconductors where everybody depends on everybody else from patents to machinery.
That's why, for example, any meaningful collaboration between Intel and Nvidia under this partnership has to be released in the form of an Intel product using Nvidia tech, rather than an Nvidia product using Intel tech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_Technologies
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/insider-says...
I wonder how AMD would have fared against Intel post-Conroe if Jensen was CEO. They were behind but still competitive until the Bulldozer flop, only recovering with Zen (and even then it took a few generations for Zen to mature).
Zen was a beast from day one. Zen 1 more or less matched Intel on single-core perf and outmatched it on multicore. Zen 1 blew Intel out of water on perf/$, so much so that the morning after booting up my Zen 1 computer, I bought as many AMD shares as I could afford.
And I don't really see the situation being that obviously different if it was Nvidia who they merged with and Jensen was CEO.
The big issue was simply that AMD didn't have the cash at hand to both pay for ATI and maintain investment in R&D, at least without their next few products completely dominating the competition. I don't see a different CEO changing that. Unless Jensen was willing to value Nvidia significantly less than ATI at the time.
Which is absolutely enormous, so this distinction is splitting hairs.
> The stake will make Nvidia one of Intel's largest shareholders, giving it roughly 4% of the company after new shares are issued.
Is that 4% still accurate?
I imagine it's a similar story. If Intel fails, Nvidia loses sales and this investment.
This is the reason we moved to using money instead of a barter system.
Its called the velocity of money, its a thing see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money
The problem is that there is all this capital and no place to put it, so yes it seems circular, but some of that is to be expected.
As for Burry, he recently called out the changes to how the big players are amortizing their capital expenses for all these data center build outs. He is correct in calling it out, but he's getting the wrong signal from it. Mores law died a long time ago, and now were basically hitting multiple walls at the same time: Node scaling at the chip fabs, power and cooling in the data center, and just more linear growth from product (because of all three factors).
Go back to 2008 ish time period. There were a lot of data centers that hit the wall with availability of power and cooling and they were hard problems to solve then. The solution was not to upgrade rather to "build new", and were seeing a lot of the same types of issues today.
Nvidia has unmaintainable margins, the memory manufacturing side is now in on the grift too... They are sucking up the profit while they can because the dip is going to be BRUTAL (likely a boon to consumers but neither here nor there).