this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024
1131 points (99.0% liked)

Technology

59312 readers
4528 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

So they got all that money from Uncle Sam's CHIPS Act only to lay off 10,000 employees and make themselves "lean". Govt funded unemployment.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

How long before Nvdia buys them, or at least tries to. Nvidia tried to buy Arm but got stopped by the UK government.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Arm is worth 5.3bn USD and employs just over 8000 people. Intel is worth just over 100bn USD and employs 124,000 people.

Nvidia is worth 42bn USD and employs 30,000 people.

That makes Intel over twice as valuable as Nvidia with over four times as many employees.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Nvidia is worth 42bn USD and employs 30,000 people.

Nvidia's has a market cap 30x of Intel's. So it could issue more stock to raise capital for a buyout. It's not the company equity but the market cap that it needs to have money to purchase. Even a controlling stake of > 50% would give them defacto control. Of course governments & regulators would probably block it or force Nvidia to divest bits of itself, and that's probably the greatest protection Intel has against such a scenario.

But if Intel weakens further, it may well be someone else tries to acquire it. I bet a lot of companies would love to snaffle it up. It's kind of ironic that Intel used to be the big dog in the semiconductor space but even AMD is bigger than it these days and are potentially many others who'd like buy it out. In fact, for all we know Intel might be shedding all these jobs to make it look more attractive to potential buyers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

The thing is that AMD and Nvidia are chip designers not chip makers. While Intel does design and print chips, the reason Intel is so critical (from US perception) is they own the foundries to make chips.

AMD decided years ago to go fabless, as for Nvidia I'm not sure they want to own the fabrication process.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Don't understand your "worth" numbers, that's generally market cap and those numbers don't line up. The employee counts line up...

100B is... close enough for Intel (though they have fallen to 95B). So $730,769 per employee

ARM is $140B... So $20,000,000 an employee...

nVidia is worth 2.7T.... $90,000,000 an employee...

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Nvidia wants IP. They do not want to buy foundries. It's too volatile and dependent on government subsidies while also being well outside their core competencies. If their products don't sell as a fabless company, they don't see growth and lose on the manufacturing cost and stop placing orders. If their products don't sell and their chip fabs run idle, they lose a shitton of money on not just the above but also the cost of maintaining the fabs. Not only is there no guarantee that Nvidia would be able to run the foundries better, it's actually quite likely they'd run them worse.