> Back to the future > Thermal issues > AI, AI, oh

Benefit of hindsight I recently re-read Jeremy Laird’s Trade Chat column from the February 2023 edition on page 13 titled:

'This cannot go on. It will not go on'. He wrote about $700 GPUs becoming the new price for a mid-market model: “It’s an incredibly short-sighted way to go about things…[AMD and Nvidia] are not just ripping off gamers, they’re hurting their own businesses. The longer they stick at this nonsense, the smaller the remaining market of PC gamers is going to be when they come back to their senses.”

I don’t believe that much has changed, and Jeremy’s conclusion may not be accurate. AMD and particularly Nvidia make vast amounts of money from enterprise/ AI supercomputer-market GPUs. The consumer graphics card market pales in comparison, particularly for Nvidia now that it’s valued at $3 trillion. As a result, I’m not sure Nvidia has any incentive to ‘properly’ price its 5000-series cards. AMD isn’t in the same boat, of course, and how it will price its 8900 XT or 8900 XTX cards is hard to determine.

–M. McCullough

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, GUY COCKER, RESPONDS:

Thanks very much for your letter—it’s always interesting to go back into the archives and see how accurate some of our predictions are with the benefit of hindsight!

Obviously, AMD and Nvidia have become stock market darlings in the 18 months since Jeremy wrote his column, with a 100 percent and 520 percent increase in share price for the two companies respectively over that time. Obviously, the majority of that growth has come from the rise in enterprise sales, particularly for the latter, whose Hopper chips are being bought up well into next year, and have captured over 90 percent of the AI market.