• Welcome to TechPowerUp Forums, Guest! Please check out our forum guidelines for info related to our community.

Softbank Dumps its Entire NVIDIA Stock Worth $3.6 Billion

I think all GPU's are overpriced. I think they should be closer to CPU prices.
I7's for $400 and I9's for $500-ish
2080's should be $400 and 2080 TI should be $500-ish...Titan RTX should be tops at $700-$800.
People are overpaying for these; by far......why? I blame the mining craze. At that point
greed hit everyone....miners, buyers, retailers, chip makers...ect... Nvidia saw what people were willing to pay.
and the only reason their still priced that high is people simply keep forking over the money.

I don't think this will end anytime soon....unless AMD comes out with a GPU that
performs better and undercuts thier price buy $300. I don't see that happening.
AMD will want some pie too.....Maybe Intel will come out with a good mid range GPU and sell it sub $200
just to get a hold and userbase in the market. Wishfull thinking.....lol.....

just my 2 cents

CPUs are only CPUs, nothing more.
You have to pay extra money for memory and motherboard to feed a CPU's needs, where as for a graphics card you literally get an all in one product. (Memory, VRM, Heat sink, fan, GPU itself etc.)
You're not comparing apples to apples here.
 
But remember, AMD had Ryzen to fall back on to help bolster their margins; nVidia didn't have that. If AMD didn't have Ryzen to help AMD would probably more than likely be dead today. So yay for Ryzen.

AMD is also a much much smaller company.
 
Nvidia saw what people were willing to pay.
I believe it was in a Hardware Unboxed video but they said the reason why nVidia's new flagship GPU (the 2080ti) costs $1200 is because when the Titan Xp was out gamers kept buying them even though nVidia said it wasn't a gaming card. So if people wouldn't have kept buying them the 2080ti probably would've been in the ballpark of $800 or so.
 
The world economy is based on eternal growth.

Indeed it is, though... To be fair, this is the foundation of capitalism with fractional central banking, not the whole world, but still... close enough.
 
And you don't realize that investing basically is following the memetrain and cashing out at the right time? .

sorry didn't see your post here. Investing in shabby startups is not something I would call the pinnacle of trading. I understand that the company is successful and all, but there's a whole other world of investors who put their money in companies who actually produce stuff, have a serious past, and a stable future, and not in shallow promises or memes. Don't tell me investing is purely based on memetrains, media hypes and empty promises.
 
Softbank is invested in other AI companies. You can't have your eggs in more than one company's basket I'm guessing, is the idea.
That's a problem of diversification, not conflict of interest.

Conflict of interest is something different.
For example: for the last few years I was doing a job that consisted of lowering my employee's profit. But at the same time my yearly bonus was based on the profit. In other words: I would be rewarded for bad work (or malpractice). That's a textbook example of conflict of interest.

As for conflict in investing: you're usually not allowed to be short on your company (because you would benefit from malpractice). I can't think of a better example.

I looked into this case during the last hour. IMO gathering funds for buyback is by far the most probable reason.
They most likely made this decision back in October when the stock was still high, but already started to go down after the mining bubble. Selling such a huge number of shares back then would be difficult. They secured the price with derivatives and waited. They sold the stock now - when it's cheap and it was easy to find buyers.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...gest-with-93-billion-of-capital-idUSKCN18G0NP
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...s-said-to-seek-investment-in-chinese-ai-giant
...and they own ARM holdings (read "Inference applications", and "Application-specific accelerators").
Just in self-driving and AI-assisted cars alone NV has a huge lead over everyone else (including their former biggest shareholder Softbank or any of its subsidiaries), and their latest contract with BOSCH might as well make it a monopoly.
Again: diversification, not conflict of interest. They may have decided to lower their investment in this particular business.
But if that was true, they could have sold a part of ARM and keep some Nvidia.
In fact when you think about AI, it's almost necessary to invest in many companies - each one is working on a solution, so it's a competition (a race in fact).
If you believe that e.g. car AI will be hugely profitable in the future, you should buy shares of many (all) key players. This way you'll earn regardless of who wins the race. :-)
The most important part IS that investors just took their whole investment out of nvidia despite its drop from its high, confidence is shaken , that could spook further investors, that's the news bit .
But then you look at the share value and clearly the confidence is not shaken.
When a major investor announced selling AMD shares, they went down instantly. It's a different situation.
 
  • Like
Reactions: bug
Titan V - enthuasiast rip-off tier
2080Ti - high enthusiast tier
2080 - enthusiast tier
2070 - high tier
2060 - mid-high tier
2050 - mid tier

Corrected it, according to current pricing.

As for the topic, regardless of the reason Softbank sold out their nVidia stock, this doesn't bode well for nVidia: we shall see ...
 
Congrats to Softbank for investing and making money, all else is tears in the rain.
 
Your theory of why Softbank sold NVDA is very brave, to be honest.
We don't know the reasons. It may have nothing to do with how they see Nvidia's future.

Maybe they simply wanted to change their portfolio structure? Get out of GPU market? Move money to something else? It doesn't mean NVDA is a bad investment. It means they found a better one.

Or maybe they simply needed cash?
The latest news is that Softbank bought back $5.5bln of their own stock. They had to sell something to get money and NVDA would have provided 2/3 of this sum.
That would actually mean NVDA is seen as an attractive stock (easy to sell quickly). And with that in mind it's easier to understand why NVDA stock went up today.

Nope, they didn't need money for that:
Mr Son will fund the share buyback using part of the funds raised by the recent $23.5bn public offering of stock in the company’s mobile subsidiary.
(https://www.ft.com/content/5f125b16-29ea-11e9-a5ab-ff8ef2b976c7 requires subscription or google)
 
That's a problem of diversification, not conflict of interest.

Conflict of interest is something different.
For example: for the last few years I was doing a job that consisted of lowering my employee's profit. But at the same time my yearly bonus was based on the profit. In other words: I would be rewarded for bad work (or malpractice). That's a textbook example of conflict of interest.

As for conflict in investing: you're usually not allowed to be short on your company (because you would benefit from malpractice). I can't think of a better example.

I looked into this case during the last hour. IMO gathering funds for buyback is by far the most probable reason.
They most likely made this decision back in October when the stock was still high, but already started to go down after the mining bubble. Selling such a huge number of shares back then would be difficult. They secured the price with derivatives and waited. They sold the stock now - when it's cheap and it was easy to find buyers.


Again: diversification, not conflict of interest. They may have decided to lower their investment in this particular business.
But if that was true, they could have sold a part of ARM and keep some Nvidia.
In fact when you think about AI, it's almost necessary to invest in many companies - each one is working on a solution, so it's a competition (a race in fact).
If you believe that e.g. car AI will be hugely profitable in the future, you should buy shares of many (all) key players. This way you'll earn regardless of who wins the race. :)

But then you look at the share value and clearly the confidence is not shaken.
When a major investor announced selling AMD shares, they went down instantly. It's a different situation.
we dissagree.


Now if you could possibly back up some of your BS with facts or you actually stated its your opinion i can leave you to your assumptions "all's well".
 
Corrected it, according to current pricing.

As for the topic, regardless of the reason Softbank sold out their nVidia stock, this doesn't bode well for nVidia: we shall see ...

Corrected again


Titan V - enthuasiast rip-off tier
2080Ti - high enthusiast rip-off tier
2080 - enthusiast rip-off tier
2070 - high tier rip-off tier
2060 - mid-tier (basic gpu why make anything worse than this?) rip-off tier
2050 - Why are you buying this rip-off tier
 
we dissagree.


Now if you could possibly back up some of your BS with facts or you actually stated its your opinion i can leave you to your assumptions "all's well".
I'm not sure which part you think needs backing up. The conflict of interest part is just textbook definition and the speculation about why they sell when they did is the best explanation I have heard so far.
 
And yet it's up so far today.
untitled130.jpg

So what. This is the real picture - and note the correlation with Nvidia's Geforce stack and datacenter pricing structure, along with their stock price. They reached for the skies, just like that stock. Its about time they get shown the door.

Softbank may well see the same thing I'm seeing: Turing isn't viable in the long run, and RTX in its current shape also is a dead end. At the same time, their automotive (Drive PX) division isn't really taking off (they are fighting a massive bunch of conglomerates far more wealthy - GM etc have all jumped on autonomous cars) and that was a last resort for their CPU R&D (Tegra has been 'getting by' on great announcements and appeared in quite a bunch of half-successful products, starting with the LG Optimus 2X, up to the SHIELD - none of it really stuck for the masses like it should to pay off the R&D invested). They've pumped a LOT of funds into avenues that were dead ends already, or are soon to be, and Turing is unlikely to ever become a sales cannon like Pascal was. Therefore the outlook is not really that rosy at all - ironically, mostly because Pascal was so good and the competition is so scarce. Lots and lots of people will be sitting on their old GPU for years to come, simply because there are barely any incentives to upgrade at this point. Its actually starting to look a lot like Intel, a desperate search for new markets that never really wants to stick, combined with the alienation of the userbase on their regular markets (price hikes / lack of generational perf/dollar improvements are very much Intel + Nvidia recipes right about now).

1549493086441.png
 
Last edited:
Low quality post by Fluffmeister
Corrected again


Titan V - enthuasiast rip-off tier
2080Ti - high enthusiast rip-off tier
2080 - enthusiast rip-off tier
2070 - high tier rip-off tier
2060 - mid-tier rip-off tier
2050 - Why are you buying this rip-off tier

PS: Where the hell is the Competition? Oh wait, here comes Vega it will easily defeat the 1080 Ti! *drum roll* ...... tears.
 
THIS is what I don't get and what I've complained about - I've read your previous post carefully.
So, again - would you buy 2080 Ti for 2000$ if it proposed 100% gain over 1080 Ti?

The whole thing about pricing cards with 4 digits is ridiculous - it's not about price/perfomance. And then again, remember that for 1500$ they only propose lower tier gpu - 2500$ for "full" one (Titan rtx).


I think thye do. It's just huang whining because he hoped for brilliant sales, so he can earn another billion with those margins - but somehting went wrong, and he earns "only" couple hundreds of $M, so he should wait additional two months to purchase that villa.



My salary doesn't grow up at that rate they're increasing prices.
I think it’s pretty clear. If they had a 2080 that was reasonably faster and cost $800ish, and then a card that was 2-3x faster but said ‘hey this costs a ton to make, it’s $5000’ people wouldn’t be as mad. It’s just that our current 2080ti doesn’t really push the boundaries of what possible, and so it’s minimal increase for maximum price feels like a ripoff.
 
I think it’s pretty clear. If they had a 2080 that was reasonably faster and cost $800ish, and then a card that was 2-3x faster but said ‘hey this costs a ton to make, it’s $5000’ people wouldn’t be as mad. It’s just that our current 2080ti doesn’t really push the boundaries of what possible, and so it’s minimal increase for maximum price feels like a ripoff.
Well, that's the reason we have ripped TU102 for 1500$ - because people tolerate the overall idea of GPU for 9999$.
I mean, 1500$ for gaming gpu isn't acceptable at all, period. Why everydoby talk about price/perf - imho, it's not the primary issue here. AFAIK, gtx 2080 ti completely useless for professionals, architects, universities, etc., right?
 
Last edited:
Well, that's the reason we have ripped TU102 for 1500$ - because people tolerate the overall idea of GPU for 9999$

People tolerate anything as long as there is no alternative, but what's missing is the actual percentage of people either willing or capable of that. Hint: its a tiny % and nothing we should worry about. Why do you think the 2060 has such a radically different perf/dollar metric as the 2080 and up? Simply because its the go-to product for the vast majority looking to upgrade at this point. Nvidia priced it so that it sells. The issue isn't a ripped TU102, the issue is that this massive die doesn't offer the performance many would expect - RT or no RT.
 
People tolerate anything as long as there is no alternative, but what's missing is the actual percentage of people either willing or capable of that. Hint: its a tiny % and nothing we should worry about. Why do you think the 2060 has such a radically different perf/dollar metric as the 2080 and up? Simply because its the go-to product for the vast majority looking to upgrade at this point. Nvidia priced it so that it sells. The issue isn't a ripped TU102, the issue is that this massive die doesn't offer the performance many would expect - RT or no RT.

Yes, but still defend it. Their latest nonsense argument: it is unreasonable and/or wishful thinking for newer and/or more powerful hardware to cost the same or be less expensive and should cost more. They say this while completely ignoring that CPUs and entire computers systems seem to be unaffected by this. Even Intel at it's worse was still giving consumers more for their money, relative value between the generations decreased but the consumer still got more.
 
I mean, 1500$ for gaming gpu isn't acceptable at all, period.
Sure it is. If either company came out with a truly incredible GPU today that could push ultra settings at 4k144hz and it had to cost $3k to make a profit that would be fine. A huge die with massive performance will cost the company money, and there will always be a market for the best of the best. That card wouldn't be for your normal consumer, but it would be a gaming gpu.
 
Low quality post by Bansaku
Looks like Turding failed to impress almost everybody. Those prices... not everyone is growing money trees in their backyard. You can only bend something so much before it breaks.
 
Congrats to Softbank for investing and making money, all else is tears in the rain.

Just one issue: They lost money. Based on their buy-in time, they lost a lot.
 
I'm a developer on Nvidia hardware more than 3 years now, the $59 Qualcomm SoC can do the same job as $2500 Nvidia SoC. If Softbank wants to invest on Qualcomm with oil money, it is their decision but I have to keep my hands clean. I don't like companies moving left and right with political reasons.
 
Just to let you folks know, SoftBank is one of the worst if not THE WORST company in Japan. They made a fortune by having a monopoly on mobile phones contracts provider with ridiculous and calous prices for their packages.
On top of that, their customer support is the worst from the known 1st world countries, while ne one in English is basically non-existing.
I've dealt with those basterds and swer never to do that mistake again.


I can afford the $1,200 for the 2080 Ti but I believe it to be a rip off
Where can you find an 1200$ RTX 2080 Ti??? The cheapest ones I could find on that price were on E-Bay and auctioned...
 
Back
Top