Interestingly, the US Govt. is also not "an individual human" and Softbank and Nvidia are both publicly traded companies.

> Otherwise these few companies are the largest holders of basically every security in existence.

Indeed. Due to inclusion of Intel in S&P500 index funds and ETFs.

Together, institutional investors own over 50% of Intel Corporation, giving them a significant collective influence on major board decisions. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/67-institutional-ownership-in...

Who controls the votes? I don't think most ETFs pass voting rights to their owners.

For sure, it’s just a common conspiracy theory boogeyman from people who don’t know how ETFs work.

USA spends $1T+ per year on "defense".

Nvidia's entire annual operating expense is about $21B.

So I'd say they have a little way to go.

They could call it West India trading company.

I want a third party to manage the buying and selling of shares as I incrementally put in small amounts of money every week into the fund.

Technically I own the fund, and the fund owns the companies. As I understand your comment, this would be disallowed.

It's inefficient in the case of a wholly-owned subsidiary to require company A's shareholders to hire lawyers, setup bank accounts, books, etc. for a separate company B which ultimately provides the same limited liability vis-a-vis third parties. Joint-ventures become tricky between corporations. Corporations can't hold potentially toxic assets. There are quite a few good ones. Interesting nonetheless.

Also as with all corporate law questions, <other jurisdiction> allows it, so we'll just go there instead.

Less than 200 years unless I'm misreading. Doesn't seem that difficult to change.

The alternative has been the government controlling which ventures are funded, at which point the government assumes the risk.

Would you rather the only entity with a monopoly on violence be liable for all risky ventures? What happens when the government has a very different ideology and goals than what you support?

Again, there is a reason the status quo of private capital doing risky business with limited liability tends to work better.

You don’t have to like it.

It's only a risk for anyone loaning to the company, and they're choosing to make those loans despite the risk.

Having an LLC doesn't get you much special protection. You could make equivalent contracts with some assets securing the loan and other assets not securing the loan. The main purpose of the LLC framework is to standardize the whole thing.

> for lab-tech salary

This is something I don't understand. These companies make good profits -- why don't they pay their experts well?

...and work graveyard shift.

That is actually a big part of how TSMC got ahead. It's a race. All those years of being able to get PhDs to work midnight-8am (because you're the most prestigious employer in the country, by far) move you to the next node just a bit faster. It adds up.

Intel's market cap is US$ 174.96 Billion

TSMC's market cap is US$ 1.560 Trillion

It turns out when you are manufacturing nvidia's GPUs, Google's TPUs, AMD's CPUs and GPUs, Apple's processors, and the flagship smartphone chips from Qualcomm, MediaTek and Broadcom - and none of them can go elsewhere because your products are so far ahead of the competitors - that's pretty valuable.

Convincing TSMC to sell you their chipmaking trade secrets? You might as well try to convince Apple to sell you their smartphone division.

Get a PhD in some kind of esoteric field like chemical kinetics and then spend a decade learning about oxide surface conditioning under someone who spent their life working on it.

None of this stuff is published (externally) and there are no discussion forums or stack overflows to help you either. You need to get through academia, prove yourself, and then you can start working on a chance to get access to the trade secrets that make it possible.

After all that you will be placed as a researcher on a handful of steps in the multi-thousand step process of making SOTA wafers. And probably not make crazy money, but at this point, you're not in it for the money anyway.

Realistically, identify the next technology that will need such wizards and get into a PhD program to research that technology.

I don't think that's allowed under the terms of the x86/x86_64 cross-license deal with AMD.

That's why, for example, any meaningful collaboration between Intel and Nvidia under this partnership has to be released in the form of an Intel product using Nvidia tech, rather than an Nvidia product using Intel tech.

Maybe all the engineers, but not the executives who created this problem to begin with

We could just force them into a RAND licensing regime and let the market solve the problem.

What I find somewhat humorous: AMD originally wanted to acquire Nvidia, but walked away when Jensen apparently insisted on becoming the CEO of the merged company.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/insider-says...

I wonder how AMD would have fared against Intel post-Conroe if Jensen was CEO. They were behind but still competitive until the Bulldozer flop, only recovering with Zen (and even then it took a few generations for Zen to mature).

> The only power non-origin nations/entities have is via leveraging their ability to do business in the region and/or their local holdings.

Which is absolutely enormous, so this distinction is splitting hairs.

I interpreted your post like what "krupan" posted in the separate sub-thread ("This is a much tighter circle than any of us should be comfortable with"), but maybe others interpreted it differently (the words of your post are quite generic...). Cheers :o)

It’s a medium risk high reward strategy. You only fail here if all the customers fail, which admittedly there’s a chance of.

If one succeeds, and grows 10-100x, you are profitable. If a few succeed, you double your market cap.

"There are lots of examples of joint ventures, partnerships, alliances, investment and mergers and acquisitions..."

And the deals Nvidia are making are different from all of those. Buying OpenAI stock so that OpenAI can buy Nvidia's products is very risky. Buying the management team and IP of Groq is a very weirdly structured deal. What was the benefit to Groq? What is the purpose of this Intel deal?