Nvidia's $279 billion backs an estimated 37% of the world's 2027 AI memory

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u/Mistuv 4d ago

The noteworthy company is not Nvidia, It's Alphabet. 36% of all HBM? God damn, that's crazy. They don't sell any of their TPUs, right? Is Google just going to build that much compute? That would basically mean that almost half of worldwide deployed AI compute would be just Google? I somehow have a hard time believing that.

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u/Chickensandcoke 4d ago

They rent out some of their TPUs, but I’m not aware of them getting into custom silicon game for third parties

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u/mmarrow 4d ago

Sell some through Broadcom to Anthropic

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u/SERIVUBSEV 4d ago

It's the Sam Altman playbook of booking out supply just so no one else gets their hands on it.

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u/Beneficial-Name-391 4d ago

Indeed, Google is turning into a hardware company lol

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u/average_AZN 4d ago

Google has the full stack. One frontier model that' can code and wall st. Will reconcile the ticker price

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u/lyral264 3d ago

Gemini literally free for the time being and it is much more usable the more you use it. To offer that for billions of people for free? Yeah google needs a lot of hardwares.

Then later they can start charging.

2

u/hey_you_too_buckaroo 3d ago

Yes, they started selling their TPUs recently.

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u/EvenBroaderBand 3d ago

The thing with Google is that they lost all the best staff to the other companies, they got DeepMind in the UK with its senior staff still but they lost everyone else.

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u/hollow_bridge 3d ago

they lost all the best staff

no they didn't lol

1

u/trouthat 3d ago

You have no idea how easy it is to spin up 30 agents at Google to work on anything you want

1

u/Strazdas1 2d ago

Why? Google has the deepest pockets and the best AI team in the world. It makes sense they will scale faster than anyone. they were years late to the race and are now already running in pole position.

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u/Boreras 4d ago

One important takeaway is that 85% of HBM goes to only three hyper solvent buyers (Nvidia, Alphabet, amd). So those ram contracts sold years in advance are probably going to get delivered, and there truly will be no return to normalcy in ram.

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u/aprx4 3d ago

That is correct. But the actual buyers of those compute are heavily in debt (neoclouds backed by Nvidia) or not yet profitable (AI model labs).

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u/CuteSquirrel01 3d ago

Doesn't matter as long as investors are ok continuing to fund them. It's all about investor confidence and right now it's in a very healthy place.

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u/matthieuC 3d ago

Nvidia and AMD sell their product, if the demand crashes they will have no use for the memory. They may be willing to pay penalties to get out of the contract.

Google is'more complicated

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u/MichalWs 3d ago edited 3d ago

It's crazy and not right that just three companies can influence the entire population of the earth for years. While globalization seems to be a good thing in many regards, it can be gamed by the big player for the benefits of super-rich at the cost of the rest of the population. The power and influence should be limited so that other people could also benefit from the progress and resources.

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u/EvenBroaderBand 3d ago

Western countries are going to start cutting each other off from web based services I can see it. Its the only way to make it so they can profit from AI and it all the money doesn't just go to the USA.

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u/itsjust_khris 3d ago

Or introduce some new form of taxation on these services

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u/CuteSquirrel01 3d ago

The US and China won't take it lying down.

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u/Express_Living2264 17h ago

weirdly china is doing nothing to answer the new extra eu custums duties.

2eur per order position

and another 2 eur per order.

AI wise i don't think china is really in the race. They are trying but the perceived gap between the us and china is huge.

1

u/putrasherni 16h ago

I would argue they are a strong second
Both on models and hardware
artificialanalysis is payed for by us companies, deepseek and glm flash ran completely on Chinese previous gen GPUs

1

u/putrasherni 1d ago

I think even worse can happen
servers and data center hardware has a 5 year shelf life after which it is sold for new hardware.

Every company that needs to refresh their tech stack is going to pay 10x more in memory costs ( and even other parts are slowly rising )

I bet cloud services are going to skyrocket in 2027/2028 to a point where companies will bleed themselves to keep afloat

1

u/Express_Living2264 17h ago

this is imho the most imminent ai threat to society. It's just a matter of time before the AI bottleneck becomes something that humans rely on as well. If poor people have to compete with AI over food then good luck...

1

u/putrasherni 16h ago

The reasoning for higher cloud costs would be
“ ai bubble bursts force us to raise rates”
circlejerk where common wealth is fleeced back to corporate greed and profit

0

u/MichalWs 3d ago

This would be the solution to share the benefits but I think US will use all its power to prevent it from happenings

6

u/aprx4 3d ago

Datacenter has been always first class customer of hardware design and manufacturing. You aren't gonna solve supply-demand disparity by some magical regulatory wand. It is the problem that's gonna solve itself. DDR5 is now significantly more profitable per wafer than HBM, thus giving manufacturers the direct incentive to relocate additional capacity toward standardized memory.

2

u/lazazael 3d ago

whos the other 15%?

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u/this_knee 4d ago

Geezus. Where’s the rest of the backing money coming from? Don’t tell me
It’s 1% here and there via angel investors.

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u/surg3on 3d ago

Private credit, mega investment firms. Somehow it'll be you funding it in the end

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u/aprx4 3d ago

It's right there in very first sentence of the article for you to read. Nvidia+Alphabet+AMD buy 85% of HBM.

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u/Strazdas1 2d ago

Google makes more profits from their other services than they spend on AI. There is no need for rest of backing money.

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u/imaginary_num6er 4d ago

Where was Sam Altman’s backing for 40% of the world’s 2026 AI memory?

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u/Strazdas1 2d ago

It never existed, that was a misinterpretation by a journalist.

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u/VirtualMage 3d ago

I just pulled the trigger, and bought 32 GB DDR5 for 589.50€...

Probably the last opportunity to afford any RAM until the end of my life... what a time to be alive...

2

u/OhVince_ 3d ago

truly sad to think about :(

-1

u/Strazdas1 2d ago

Yes. Its really sad that he will never have 600 euros of disposable income for the rest of his life.

1

u/Express_Living2264 17h ago

600EUR likely won't get him that ram next month. the rtx5090 price trend is insane. The card basically gets 550EUR more expensive every month since may.

1

u/Strazdas1 1h ago

The RTX5090 trend is the last one you should look at for average consumer target. He also specificaly saidhe wont be able to afford RAM, not GPUs.

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u/GamerHaste 1d ago

Kept having my pc crash due to running out of ram with 32gb recently ended up needing to get 64gb of ddr5… that shit hurt.$1200

1

u/goldcakes 2h ago

In a some countries like Australia 2x48GB (96GB) is only a tiny bit more expensive than 2x32GB (64GB). If you’re still within the return window it could be worth considering.

I got 96GB for A$1500 with taxes the other day, worth it instead of getting 64GB for A$1200.

1

u/GamerHaste 2h ago

Damn I probably should have looked into that, I ended up getting it a bit cheaper on eBay but didn’t look at 96

1

u/kokkomo 3d ago

Smells like antitrust to me

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u/NooBias 11h ago

DDR5 will not be a problem medium term. The shortage that i see no ending is GDDR6-7.

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u/EvenBroaderBand 3d ago edited 3d ago

Daily reminder that when the dot-com bubble popped the internet still existed afterwards and if you had bought 1 Amazon share at $28 IPO you would have after splits 240 shares totaling $50K right now, these companies are going to be a lot bigger than Amazon.

1

u/jaaval 21h ago

Why would they be bigger than amazon?

News Nvidia's $279 billion backs an estimated 37% of the world's 2027 AI memory

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