Jensen Huang – Will Nvidia’s moat persist?

Back in the dot-com bubble, people started inventing new metrics to "value" dot-com companies that lost money hand over fist. My favorite was "revenue multiples". So instead of a a P/E ratio, it was just a multiple of revenue no matter how much money you lost. We've invented a new term here too: revenue backlog. OpenAI and Anthropic in particular need to recover probably at least $2 trillion to recoup their capex investments. Now Claude code has had an impact on software engineering but for a lot of AI uses you're just not going to recover $2T on $20/month subscriptions. It reminds me of Twitter trying to dig itself out of a $44B hole and losing half their ad revenue with $8/month blue ticks. The only commercial product AI sells is labor displacement and the resulting wage suppression. You lay off 10-20% of your staff and nobody is asking for raises. The people left are happyt o still have jobs (and thus a house). They'll work even harder doing unpaid labor of the displaced workers to keep those jobs. That's what OpenAI and Anthropic are selling. The problem is that if these companies get their way, 10-20% of the population is going to be out-of-work and society is going to fall apart. Data centers are going to be the targets of increased societal desperation and anger as this gets worse. There was a report this week that roughly 50% of singles in the US aren't dating because they can't afford to [1]. This goes well beyond the well-understood problems of not being able to aff

The China example was such a massive blunder (from the perspective of US soft power). Like you say, it created a captive market for Chinese chips where Chinese companies might've otherwise bought foreign chips. That's inbuilt demand. But China also has something Europe doesn't and that's central planning. China has realized that chipmaking and AI are issues of national security. Europe just doesn't have that level of governance and forethought. Within 5 years China will be producing their own EUV chips despite the ASML export ban. And you know who realizes all this? The Nvidia CEO [1][2]. There is now a 70 year history of Europe being designed as and becoming comfortable with being a US vassal state, from the end of WW2 to Bretton-Woods, the Marshall Plan and NATO. I don't see fascist takeovers in the UK, France or Germany as changing any of this. If anything, it'll just fracture any semblance of European unity. It'll be the enemy within as those forces will be most aligned with the US. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]

Dwarkesh Patel has AI/ML guests on his podcast. BoorishBears may have been referring to the Jensen Huang episode where they discuss TPUs: [VIDEO]

If nothing else, Anthropic has explicitly acknowledged the threat to its moat and that the margin is thin between its models and open-weight models. I'd take that as a win for open-weight models. Good luck preventing distillation and limiting the supply of accelerators to China when Jensen himself is a strong opponent of any such barriers [1]. [1] [VIDEO]