I wonder how NVIDIA gets to report their investment here from an accounting perspective?
Could they book the money TogetherAI spends on GPUs as revenue now, and then when TogetherAI flops and returns five cents on the investment dollar write it off in a different line of business?
Nvidia spending money on nvidia hardware is less annoying than the model of raising money from VCs to give to nvidia. It's an interesting question though - does it still count as a high risk investment worthy of tax advantages if lots of the investment is spent on the hardware the invester sells?
NVIDIA probably recognizes revenue upon delivery of product. The investment write down would probably impact their P&L and have some associated tax benefits there.
None of the cloud providers are monopolies, but there are few enough they can collude through tit for tat, though at times I think some were run for growth at a loss.
I believe all have multi thousand percent margins on egress bandwidth.
I don’t find it surprising that SaaS list price margins could be that high. The big purchasers do volume discounts to get massive discounts while the smaller players are forced to pay more.
No because the overhead and uncertainty involved with smaller customers means they cost more and are less loyal / locked in and thus represent more risk. The smaller customers represent very little revenue in the short term and if one grows to any real size negotiations with sales begins.
Could they book the money TogetherAI spends on GPUs as revenue now, and then when TogetherAI flops and returns five cents on the investment dollar write it off in a different line of business?