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Comment by zmgsabst | Hacker News Reader

“I wouldn’t pick up $20 if there was $100 on the ground!”

Most people would pick up both.

These economic proclamations don’t seem to make sense, when applied to different contexts — which suggests what you’re saying might be folk wisdom rather than sound theory (and greatly over simplifying the problem).

You’re also discounting ecosystem effects — gaming GPUs driving demand for datacenter and workstation GPUs as hobbyist experimentation turns into industrial usage. We don’t know what would happen if nVidia stopped suppressing the GPU market, because it’s never been tried — nVidia has always viciously undercut their own grassroots.

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> “I wouldn’t pick up $20 if there was $100 on the ground!” Most people would pick up both.

No, it’s more like there’s a massive pile of both $20s and $100s on the ground. You wouldn’t waste time running between the two, you’d focus on the $100s

If I have a garbage bag, I'm shoving everything in there.

> Most people would pick up both.

if you're within reach of both, then it's not a choice, and there's no opportunity cost in picking just one - you'd be taking both.

If not within reach of both but just one, and you picking one up means someone else might pick up the other, then which would you choose? The other is then by definition, the opportunity cost.

nVidia is sitting on a huge pile of cash, ie, they’re not constrained by resources — hence the framing as a choice.

cash cannot buy more fabs. ASML machines are the constraint, plus TSMC's capacity is a constraint.

Not to mention that nvidia's cash pile isn't magic - they should not overpay for capacity; they're better off returning cash to investors in that case.

The problem is that Nvidia cannot make infinite amounts of chips so they actually can't pick up both.

You’re standing on a traffic island in the middle of a busy road. The lights change allowing you to cross. On one side there is a $20 note, on the other there is a $100 note. Which side do you go to first?

If you were carrying heavy shopping in both arms would you stop to pick up a quarter?

A dollar?

I wouldn't pick up either even with empty hands. No idea where they've been. Maybe a fiver, a twenty sure. At that point I'd put down my bags and grab both.

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