kuudes

thanks @sanyero for the comment!

I did some digging on internet re question if Nvidia can meet demand. It seems to me that they very likely already have the resources to meet even very high demand very fast by changing part of their current gaming GPU fabbing slots to datacenter gpu slots, as they use same TSMC technology. It seems to me they have done this arbitrage also in the past with the cryptomining boom.

The open question that remains is how much demand will there be for the GPUs, but it seems to me coming 12 months might be quite high in demand given now also governments have started to make random billion dollar projects and purchase orders for the GPUs because of cloud sovereignty. Commercially one still would presume future and current revenue of next year is still lower than the maximum price of capital, ie the datacenter GPUs, that bring the revenue, so for revenue of 1 G$ next year one might expect companies willing to make current investment purchases of maybe at least 10 G$ now. So GPU sales should be maybe at least 1 year before meaningful revenues of AI use start to come in, and this should lead to revenue structure where first Nvidia and datacenter constructors gain revenue, and then later after that AI operators gain revenue from customers. So for each dollar of AI revenue next year, Nvidia likely should earn more than 1 dollar this year.

But, on supply: apparently Nvidia shipped already in 2023 3.7 million GPU units for data centers, which is a higher number than their previous plans of 2 million h100s for 2024. I guess many of last year's might have been something else than hoppers.

Given Hopper uses same process than 40-series of consumer GPUs, and given there has been 24 million such sold in 2022; and given hopper seems to have 4/3 die size compared to 4090 and blackwell twice of that; it seems to me it is plausible Nvidia can make up to 18 million hoppers per year and up to 9 million blackwells, if they want to cannibalize all of their consumer GPUs.

Given h100 costs 30000$, last year's 3.7M units in hoppers would be about 100 G$, presuming no growth from last year. Earnings of 22.5 G$ for last quarter would be about in line with that.

Sources:

https://www.hpcwire.com/2024/06/10/nvidia-shipped-3-76-million-data-center-gpus-in-2023-according-to-study/ 2024-07-10

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-to-reportedly-triple-output-of-compute-gpus-in-2024-up-to-2-million-h100s 2023-08-24

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nvidia-increases-blackwell-orders-from-tsmc-by-25-percent-18m-gb200-nvl36-server-cabinet-expected-to-account-for-bulk-of-deliveries/ 2024-07-16

https://money.udn.com/money/story/5612/8094994?from=edn_maintab_index 2024-07-15

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-4090.c3889

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwell_(microarchitecture)

https://wccftech.com/nvidia-to-dominate-data-center-share-in-2024-46-billion-usd-revenue-expected/ 2024-02-01

https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/steam-survey-suggests-more-people-bought-the-rtx-4090-than-the-steam-deck-along-with-millions-of-other-rtx-40-series-gpus 2024-01-02

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-maintains-lead-as-sales-of-graphics-cards-hit-all-time-low-in-2022-jpr 2023-03-04

https://www.trendforce.com/news/2024/07/02/news-nvidias-h200-order-delivered-from-q3-boosting-server-supply-chain-with-strong-demand/ 2024-07-02

https://longportapp.com/en/news/206075733 2024-06-12