Asa Fitch
speaker
119 appearances
5 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard 16 Jun
Asa Fitch’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Expectations for Nvidia are always very high in terms of its revenue and its outlook for the coming period. Investors have gotten used to Nvidia always beating expectations for revenue and revenue. Growing at an insane rate, this problem in China, which represents a pretty significant part of their revenues, creates some uncertainty about how much NVIDIA can beat those expectations in the future.
There's a longer term impact. Five and a half billion in the current quarter relates to inventory and other sorts of supplies and things they need to put these things together. Those supplies and that inventory and that other stuff that they're taking a charge on represents a much greater amount of revenue that the company would otherwise have received.
Some analysts estimate it's about $13 billion. I've seen one analyst report suggesting something like $20 billion of revenue this year. So it is a pretty significant hit beyond just the $5.5 billion charge that made the headlines.
Well, there's a bit of tension between companies who want to please the Trump administration by doing more stuff in the U.S. and a Trump administration that wants companies to disentangle themselves from China. NVIDIA is playing this game just like everybody is, and they made this commitment. Some analysts see that as part of a quid pro quo.
We'll scratch your back, Trump administration, you scratch ours. Trump administration in making this move seems like they're not scratching NVIDIA's back too much. And that move a few days ago to invest in the U.S. does not seem to have changed calculus of the folks in charge in Washington. So for NVIDIA, maybe that's a hard lesson. We'll see how it plays out, though.
One thing that we've seen in the past is that the policy around tariffs, around export restrictions, these things are changing all the time.
Thank you.
I'll take it. That's a good nickname. I like it.
Just think about, you know, the 80s and the 90s, there were PCs and they had chips. And then there was the smartphone revolution, and then everybody's carrying smartphone with chips in the smartphone. And you had cloud computing, you know, these massive data centers, and they had chips. And of course, now you have AI, and AI sort of runs on chips.
So every time that society's advanced, the answer has been, we need some more chips for that.
Intel's been in the Dow for 25 years. What a knock for Intel.
It's a long story. You could argue it's a tale of hubris, of excessive confidence. It's a tale of rigidity and a lack of flexibility that often large corporations have to contend with.
The company became this dominant force with the rise of the personal computer. Everybody needed a computer in their house. Eventually, laptops came along as well. Most of them, almost all of them, had Intel chips inside of them.
There was that famous marketing campaign, of course, Intel Inside.
Right, exactly. And, you know, it was a bonanza for a long time.
If you're a dominant player and you're just raking in the money... it's a little bit easier to not be serious about shaking things up. And it goes to the sort of the quote-unquote innovator's dilemma, essentially, where a company becomes a powerful player in one area and then struggles to dominate or make a name for itself in another area.
And TSMC had become extremely successful in this world, was building a growing business around it. Intel, of course, saw that happening. But Intel decided to stick to its guns and not to kind of bifurcate itself in the same way the industry was going. They said essentially, no, we don't want to do that.
You know, the company tries to make the most advanced chips in the world. You know, what that means is like, you know, when you have a chip, it's a piece of silicon. And upon that silicon, they etch billions upon billions of transistors. And so you might ask, okay, well, what makes one chip better than another? The answer is basically you're able to pack more transistors in that small space.
That's very important in the chip world. It's like the most important thing. If you can have a lot of transistors, it means you can do a lot of stuff. I mean, you can produce the best AI chips in the world. You can produce the fastest calculating CPUs in the world. Your computer that you're on now can run faster, a lot faster, if it has more transistors. It's like having a bigger brain.
So Intel kind of lost its way in that race. It just started to fall behind these contract chip makers like TSMC in making the most advanced chips. By 2019, things were not going well for the company. That was very clear. There was a sense within the company that, you know, Intel had already sort of lost its glory, its glory days were over, and the mission was to kind of bring it back.
Showing 21–40 of 119 · page 2 of 6
← Previous
Next →