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Comment by dtagames | Hacker News Reader

Demand for chips has only increased since their invention and never gone down, much less "to zero." Chips are a critical part of the tech business for the foreseeable future, regardless of what happens with AI or any other use case for them. They're raw material for computing, and computing use only goes up.

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NVIDIA growth in data center sales the last 4 years: 2022: from $6.7 billion +58.5% to $10.61 billion; 2023: +41.4% to $15.01 billion; 2024: +216.7% to $47.53 billion; 2025: +142.4% to $115.19 billion

NVIDIA isn’t a startup. It isn’t disrupting a market. It is the ESTABLISHMENT. Low double-digit growth numbers for market leader in established industries would be, by itself tremendously remarkable. Apple was 6% last year, for example. That’s doing great.

NVIDIA grew 142% this year and 217% the year before. That’s… that’s f%#£ing unbelievable is what that is.

The entire consumer market for NVIDIA is less than 10% of their data center market. NVIDIA is a ln AI company with a side hustle in computer graphics. Oh and a nontrivial amount of that is researchers and small companies buying consumer chips for non-LLM AI training and inference, so real numbers are even smaller.

“Zero”, while not mathematically accurate, is indistinguishable here. Elimination of most of the data center sales would immediately move market valuations by trillions of dollars.

Demand for networking equipment has only increased since their invention and never gone down, much less "to zero".

I'm sure that same phrase was echoed at Nortel and more offices in the 90s.

It's all hot stuff until you have a few billion dollars worth of inventory manufactured that you can barely give away for a million dollars one day. Sure it's not zero, but you're still pretty fucked in the end.

NVIDIA doesn’t separate their networking revenue, but at time of acquisition mellanox had less than a billion dollars on sales. Less a half a percent of NVIDIA’s current data center sales. That has undoubtedly grown, but I would be surprised if the networking share of their data center business was more than a rounding error. Keep in mind they sell GPUs for $50k, 2-8GPUs per box, and even a state of the art Infiniband card to put in that machine is only a few thousand bucks.

You are missing his point.

I think I replied to the wrong comment, thank you.

Man, I feel old. I remember feeling this way during dot-com bubble. The few months of unemployment grounded me. Anyway, better positioned this time. History is a good teacher.

This time the bubble has companies firing tens of thousands of employees because they think AI has made then redundant. When the bubble popped the first time, the internet thing stuck around and was a permanent change, popping the bubble wasn't a return to the status quo. I wonder how it will work out this time.

Feeling which way? Demand for chips are much higher than it was at the peak of the dot-com bubble. That was a painful period, but only a blip in the history. Everything considered “hype” back then has become reality, at a scale that was beyond any dot-com era expectation.

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