Regulators? In this administration?

There is no such thing.

Intel had an opportunity to differentiate themselves by offering more VRAM than Nvidia is willing to put in their consumer cards. It seemed like that was where Battlemage was going.

But now, are they really going to undermine this partnership for that? Their GPUs probably aren't going to become a cash cow anytime soon, but this thing probably will. The mindset among American business leaders of the past two decades has been to prioritize short-term profits above all else.

The likelihood intel AI was going to catch up with efforts like AWS Trainium, let alone Nvidia was already vanishingly small. This gives intel a chance at maintaining leading edge fab technologies.

I feel bad for gamers - I’ve been considering buying a B580 - but honestly the consumer welfare of that market is a complete sidenote.

Consumer gpus are totally different products from the high end gpus now. Intel has failed on the gpu market and has effectively zero market share, so it is not actually clear there is an antitrust issue in that market. It would be nice if there was more competition but there are other players like AMD and a long tail of smaller ones

The regulators want this because it’s bolstering the last domestic owned fab.

Any down the road repercussions be damned from their perspective.

Intel doesn’t deserve anything. They deserve to disappear based on how they ran the company as a monopoly. No lessons were learned.

If anything, it might be more of a strategic retreat or a hedged bet

Right now, for the US national interests, our biggest concern is that Intel continues to exist. Intel has been making crappy GPUs for 25 years. They weren’t going to start making great GPUs now.

Besides, who would actually use them if they don’t support CUDA?

Everyone designs better GPUs than Intel - even Apple’s ARM GPUs have been outpacing Intel for a decade even before the M series.

I don't think this is Intel trying to save itself, it's nVidia. Intel GPUs have been in 3rd place for a long time, but their integrated graphics are widely available and come in 2nd place because nVidia can't compete in the x86 space. Intel graphics have been closing the gap with AMD and are now within what? A factor of 2 or less (1.5?)

IMHO we will soon see more small/quiet PCs without a slot for a graphics card, relying on integrated graphics. nVidia has no place in that future. But now, by dropping $5B on Intel they can get into some of these SoCs and not become irrelevant.

The nice thing for Intel is that they might be able to claim graphics superiority in SoC land since they are currently lagging in CPU.

RIP Arc and Gaudi. There is no other way how to read this. Fewer competitors => higher prices.

That was targeted at supporting more tightly integrated and performant Macbooks .... it flopped because Apple came up with M1, not because it was bad per se.

Stick some CUDA cores on the CPU and market is for AI?

> Intel tried something similar with AMD (Kaby Lake-G). They paired a Kaby Lake CPU with a Vega GPU and HBM, but the product flopped

/me picturing Khaby Lame gesturing his hands at an obvious workaround.

To me, this just validates what AMD has been doing for over a decade. Integrated GPUs for personal computing are the way forward.

>Remember when Microsoft invested in Apple when Apple was down in the dumps? This is giving similar vibes.

Doesn't feel the same because the 1997 investment was arranged by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. He had a long personal relationship with Bill Gates so could just call him to drop the outstanding lawsuits and get a commitment for future Office versions on the Mac. Basically, Steve Jobs at relatively young age of 42 was back at Apple in "founder mode" and made bold moves that the prior CEO Gil Amelio couldn't do.

Intel doesn't have the same type of leadership. Their new CEO is a career finance/investor instead of a "new products new innovation" type of leader. This $5 billion investment feels more like the result of back-channel discussions with the US government where they "politely" ask NVIDIA to help out Intel in exchange for less restrictions selling chips to China.

I don't think that's an apt comparison, given that Microsoft and Apple were more direct competitors than Intel and Nvidia; the latter have a more symbiotic relationship. I think the rationale is closer to the competitor of my competitor is my friend -- they face two threats by AMD growing larger in the CPU market:

- a bigger R&D budget for their main competitor in the GPU market

- since Nvidia doesn't have their own CPUs, they risk becoming more dependent on their main competitor for total system performance.

That Microsoft-Apple deal was part lifeline, part strategic insurance. Intel clearly needs a win, and Nvidia needs more control over its ecosystem without being chained to TSMC forever

Nah I have feeling this is part of the result of the arm twisting to be allowed to sell to China.

It's even more ironic when you remember in 2005 the tables were turned, and Intel was trying to buy Nvidia.

Does intel have someone who will return and change the course of the company or return to its original mission or something of that sort?

All they need now is a CEO like Steve Jobs…

Competition?

> Remember when Microsoft invested in Apple when Apple was down in the dumps?

Had Apple failed, Microsoft would probably have been found to have a clear monopolistic position. And microsoft was already in hot waters due to InternetExplorer IIRC.

If you were a big enough customer you could get a SKU for you, too. E.g. hyperscalers have Xeons which are not available for any other customers for any price.

Spot on about the AI/mobile parallel. Intel sat out the smartphone wave while pretending it didn’t matter, and now they’re scrambling not to miss the AI train

> Actually listening to people that want to buy your stuff, whatever next?

This is very likely the new culture that LBT is bringing in. This can only be good.

Only the fab part is. Intel needs to separate the two. Maybe Nvidia, AMD, or Qualcomm can buy the the fab part.

Yeah, it definitely has that “optics-first” vibe to it.

It probably kills any prospect of Intel releasing a market disrupter card that many were calling for - a 64GB or 92GB card with even middling performance for under $1k.

It's pretty clear AMD and Nvidia are gatekeeping memory so they can iterate over time and protect their datacenter cards.

Intel had a prime opportunity to blow this up.

That's what I think of, along with favour from their new investment sibling, the US government. AMD doesn't want to be super competitive, they like their margins and being second choice in a hypetastic market. Even though Arc has very low adoption, it was making signs of doing scrappy things, like enabling two 24GB GPUs on one card from third party vendors, which got the hobby/upstart community pretty excited. Ultimately it's not a real market giving the people what they want via competition, it's all contrived by politics and the biggest players.

imho the entire point of this for nvidia is to kill arc

Correction: Renegotiated a prior loan as a $8.9B stock purchase.

There's some case for self-interest – propping up another fab etc. – but I do wonder how much of it is USG. (The economic case for Intel integrating Nvidia silicon on-chip doesn't too much sense to me: there's no growth potential in commodity/consumer x86, and maybe they can shove their new integrated Nvidia in front of enterprise buyers, but I'd be a dubious re: ROI.)

> I'm guessing NVidia didn't do this by choice. Propping up Intel doesn't seem in their best interests

In a top-down oligarchy, their best interests are served by focusing on the desires of the great leader, in contrast to a competitive bottom-up market economy, where they would focus on the desires of customers and shareholders.

I think if Nvidia wanted to acquire Intel, they would acquire Intel.

Intel has never been so cheap relative to the kinds of IP assets that Nvidia values and probably will not be ever again if this and other investments keep it afloat.

Trump's FTC would not block.

You write with proper case-sensitivity for their titles which suggests some historic knowledge of the two. They have been very close partners on CPU+GPU for decades. This investment is not fundamentally changing that.

The current CEO is more like a CFO--cutting costs and eliminating waste. There are two exits from that: sell off, as you say, and re-investment in the products of most likely future profit. This could be a signal that the latter is the plan and that the competitive aspects of the nVidia-intel partnership will be sidelined for a while.

It's absolutely not, the ARC line is not a threat in any way to nVidia, it's to get it's feet into the CPU market without the initial setup costs and research it would take to start from scratch.

They will be dominating AMD now on both fronts if things go smoothly for them.

They aren’t merging - this is Nvidia ensuring their tech is in Intel chips.

You can't be serious.

Intel was well on its way to be a considerable threat to NVIDIA with their Arc line of GPUs, which are getting better and cheaper with each generation. Perhaps not in the enterprise and AI markets yet, but certainly on the consumer side.

This news muddies this approach, and I see it as a misstep for both Intel and for consumers. Intel is only helping NVIDIA, which puts them further away from unseating them than they were before.

Competition is always a net positive for consumers, while mergers are always a net negative. This news will only benefit shareholders of both companies, and Intel shareholders only in the short-term. In the long-term, it's making NVIDIA more powerful.

It’s the most important part of the story. It’s so gross that companies can just dilute and create stock out of thin air like this. Why hold stock in Intel if the only people that ever buy the real stock and create buy pressure are the plebs? Here is the previous time…

> Intel stock experienced dilution because the U.S. government converted CHIPS Act grants into an equity stake, acquiring a significant ownership percentage at a discounted price, which increased the total number of outstanding shares and reduced existing shareholders' ownership percentage, according to The Motley Fool and Investing.com. This led to roughly 11% dilution for existing shareholders

Unless Nvidia outright absorbs intel I think Intel would have to be kind of crazy to stop developing GPUs.

So long as the AI craze is hanging in there it feels like having that expertise and IP is going to have high potential upside.

Seems Nvidia needs an alternative to MediaTek or wants to pressure MediaTek given the announcement of x86 Intel/Nvidia SoCs and the delay of DGX Spark, GB10 and N1X.

They wanted to launch DGX Spark early summer and it's nowhere to be seen, while strix halo is shipping in over 30+ SKUs from all major manufacturers.

The government is the one pushing this deal. They won't block it.

USG's far more interested in (scare quotes intentional) "AI dominance", and pushing American tech to fuse to do so – damn the consumer.

> No way this doesn't get blocked by antitrust

That action may cease to exist soon, especially after Vance is POTUS and the courts stacked with Peter Thiel loyalists that back his vision of anti-competition. Bet on it.

who's running antitrust these days

they need domestic chip capabilities

Except that Nvidia, Inc. doesn't own any of that NVDA stock, other people do, and they cannot access that money. Nvidia, Inc. owns net profit, which is orders of magnitude less than market cap. Last year's net profit was just under $73 billion. ($5 billion is still very affordable, too be sure).

Yes for efficiency, not for speed.

Yet here I am just frothing for GPUs

Difference is, AMD wasn't a competitor for ATi. One mostly built CPU's, while another- GPUs. These two, on the other hand, are competing in several major product categories. Overall, not a good look

Fitting. Then you used to bolt a GPU to a computer. These days you bolt a computer to a GPU.

You mean AMD's unified architecture. They were a founder of the HSA Foundation that drove innovation in this space complete with Linux kernel investments and unified compute SDKs, and they had the first shipping hardware support.

It's typical in these situations that the price per stock is negotiated, with current SP as a starting point. It's fairly unusual, I think, for the company selling stock to get a price significantly higher than market price. It's more typical that there's a slight discount. At least that's been the case for every stock I owned where dilution has occured. We also don't know yet when exactly this deal was negotiated and approved, so it's hard to actually say. Considering where INTC has been very recently(below $20), $23.28 seems very reasonable to me.

The reason the stock surged up past $30 is the general market's reaction to the news, and subsequent buying pressure, not the stock transaction itself. It seems likely that once the exuberance cools down, the SP will pull back, where to I can't say. Somewhere between $25 and $30 would be my bet, but this is not financial advice, I'm just spitballing here.

It’s a corporate engagement ring.

Article mentions it amounts to ~5% ownership

I would assume not given their market cap.

It's written in the article that the $5B represents about 5% of Intel stock outstanding.

No, but it's still a big stake from the largest player in semis. You wouldn't expect a move like that if they didn't see an opportunity there.

They're shipping arm derived cpus and have been for years.

That's quite literally why bonds are bonds and equity is equity...

If there’s a time to do it, now would be the time with the current administration looking at all the regulatory blowback.

If you wanted to acquire Intel you'd do it now. Maybe Intel's future products are garbage and they do worse - but the upside seems pretty high otherwise. This seems like a bit of a firesale price to acquire an advanced fab and CPU maker. Sure, it's Intel and they haven't been doing great, but companies with solid reliable outlooks don't trade this cheaply.

Ofc I would kind of hope/expect antitrust to object given that Intel makes both GPUs and CPUs, and Nvidia is/has dipped their toes into CPU production as well.

It would be 100% Trump to have Nvidia buy Intel and then announce how good of an investment decision he made by buying a slice of intel.

USA, where the federal government is picking winners and losers by making risky stock bets with public money.

The entire AI ecosystem that is being built out looks very suspect frankly..

In terms of voting stock, they become the biggest owner after US Commerce Department.

As customer they get better access to Intel Foundry and can offload some capacity from TSMC.

tbf, If I were Nvidia and antitrust wasn't an issue I'd be tempted to buy the whole thing.

Intel has a market cap just 2.5% of NVDA, so you could give away just 2.5% of your stock to buy the entirety of Intel. It's bonkers.

This is a technology forum first and foremost. I know it might not look that way given the recent flood of political activism articles. But, in the technology field, this is pretty big news. This stake makes Nvidia one of Intel's biggest shareholders.

Isn't 5% somewhat significant chunk? I really wouldn't call it tiny one. Maybe not even small anymore.

It's a good deal for Nvidia, because custom x86 server CPUs have optimization potential for AI computing clusters, which matters now that Nvidia has competitors that they didn't just 2 years ago. I think that the next several years of Nvidia will be ones of fending off growing competition.

They basically baked in a massive investment profit into the deal. When you factor in the stock jump since this announcement, Nvidia has already made billions.

Market cap was closer to 90B before this deal was announced