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  • Hacker News
  • ITT: Bubblers in full force!
  • Given 5g patent mostly h, usa has missed the boat. Somehow has to find its way back or be dominated. Not necessarily can build an empire or even a duopoly… but at least stay in the game like Intel. Understandable from usa point of view.
  • What exactly is "AI-RAN"?
    by mgh2
  • It's the name given to an initiative by telco vendors like Nokia and Ericson to explore using NVIDIA GPUs to supply the core compute needs of next generation Radio Access Networks (RAN).

    It's a potential 6G architecture.

  • AI-RAN is the strategic play here because it's unknown (outside of research lab NDAs ?) what potential real-time physical AI/ML implementation will have on the future of edge processing like organizing the low-layer 6G spectrum contention mechanisms. It's a near certainty that custom AI accelerators are a part of every radio base station in the near future so this is not cash investment but a new product line Joint Venture similar to the Intel story.
  • The radio access network (RAN) is all the RF part of a mobile network: towers, base stations, the signals between our phones and the towers, phone-to-satellite comms (non-terrestrial network or NTN).

    AI-RAN uses AI/ML for adaptive behaviors and optimizations in all these links.

    For example, fine-grained RF and modulation details, called the channel state information (CSI), is constantly being exchanged between a phone and a base station. The volume of information creates transmission latencies. Using autoencoder models, this information can be semantically compressed to reduce its volume and decoded with high fidelity on the other side.

    That's just one example. In the upcoming 6G, RAN will be "AI-native", using AI/ML everywhere. The standards may require AI accelerator chips in most base stations, NTN satellites, phones, and other elements.

  • Based on the stock price, some people knew it already a week ago :-)
  • You mean, a week ago when they announced their better than predicted Q3 earnings...?
  • Add to the list of AI cash merry go round [1]

    [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3JfOxx6Hh4

  • This isn't the gotcha everyone in the media thinks it is.

    Nvidia is using its revenues to quickly invest in bets that are simultaneously customers.

    If anything, it's a triple win.

    - taking advantage of cash it needs to deploy

    - making new investments in areas NVidia wants to shape

    - making new customers that continue to buy Nvidia GPUs, especially if they're successful

    Some of these ventures may fail, but it's better than distributing dividends or issuing stock buybacks if you believe this technology will be useful in the future.

    Companies doing this purely off of equity, stock valuation, and product/services agreements are even smarter as they're using pure hype to fund strategy.

  • I always forget that Nokia bought out Siemens part of "Nokia Siemens Networks" and it is now just "Nokia networks".
  • And they also bought Alcatel-Lucent.

    Nokia today is sort of “everybody who was making networks in Europe and North America except Ericsson”.

  • Diversify before the AI money dries up.
  • AI hardware really is the new oil, this sort of thing reminds me of the saudis.
  • Maybe they got so much money with the AI boom that they don't know anymore what to do with the cash at hand and so starts to invest it in direct now.
  • I was reading an article earlier today that said passive investing is more than 50% of the market--and since most ETFs allocate by market cap, it causes a reinforcing feedback loop for market cap leaders.
  • they need to ensure future, potential customers and the best way to do that is to own them and tell them to buy your goods.

    in five years, NVDA's business strategy will be like CocaCola's, forcing bottlers to buy their syrups.

  • The stock of NVIDIA can buy the 230 smallest S&P 500 companies. Which are still quite big companies. I recently learned this fact and I think it is pretty wild.
  • Each of them separately, or all of them together?
  • In year 2000, Nokia had a market cap of around $100 billion and Nvidia had a market cap of around $2 to 4 billion.

    Nvidia just made graphics cards, at a time when games were still being written for MS-DOS. Nobody was to imagine the real money to be made from repurposing these graphics cards for crypto and now this AI 'application'.

  • This is also why them collapsing will take out the US stock market
  • Its' getting more crazy by the day. Today NVidia added >300B USD in market cap. That's enough more than the valuation of Intel for example. Or more than Toyota. That 1B USD investement was money well spent !
  • Do you mean their market cap? Sure but that doesn’t equal their profits or cash reserves which are considerably less so NVIDIA couldn’t buy the 230 companies even if I wanted to
  • I think the US Gov probably "incentizied" Nvidias stake in Intel, and I wonder if they did here as well.

    It's like "if your going to sell chips to China, you have to spend some of the money funding non-Chinese tech".

    Nokia's capabilities to deliver 5G networks is a direct competitor to Huawei, right?

    Is Nvidia functionally an strategic hedge fund of the US Government? Would this fall under Jeffrey Sach's realm?

  • > I wonder if they did here as well

    Interesting. Trump and the Finnish President meet a few weeks ago and explicitly discussed Nokia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XmnKjx3LYw

  • Do you mean David Sacks, the AI czar?
  • > I think the US Gov probably "incentizied" Nvidias stake in Intel, and I wonder if they did here as well.

    If you wanted something in the x86 space it was either Intel or AMD. AMD is a direct competitor. If I was Nvidia I'd have done something about Intel. At least stop them from crashing further.

  • Yes, worked there and can confirm Nokia (previously known as Alcatel Lucent) is Cellphone infastructure.
  • Not a direct competitor, they are at a No3 slot behind Ericsson with a small global footprintmainly concentrated in NorthAmerica and some EU markets. However most of the 5G/5G+ patents are Huawei owned and FRAND so in any case the entiti in the drivers seat is H , thas why even the whole OpenRAN project didnt get far. Most likely like you surmiseits a geo-political hedge play.
  • >I think the US Gov probably "incentizied" Nvidias stake in Intel, and I wonder if they did here as well.

    They definitely did, Intel existing is probably an issue of national security at this point, if Intel fell then there'd be the risk of some other nation's company being part of the duopoly.