Intel had an opportunity to differentiate themselves by offering more VRAM than Nvidia is willing to put in their consumer cards. It seemed like that was where Battlemage was going.

But now, are they really going to undermine this partnership for that? Their GPUs probably aren't going to become a cash cow anytime soon, but this thing probably will. The mindset among American business leaders of the past two decades has been to prioritize short-term profits above all else.

It may be that Nvidia doesn’t really see Intel as a competitor. Intel serve a part of the GPU market that Nvidia has no interest in. This reminds me a bit of Microsoft’s investment into Apple. Microsoft avoided the scorn of regulators by keeping Apple around as a competitor and if they succeed, great, they make money off of the deal.

I remember when I was studying for an MBA.. a professor was talking about the intangible value of a brand .. and finance.. and how they would reflect on each other .. At some point we were decomposing the parts of a balance sheet and they asked if one could sell the goodwill to invest in something else .. and the answer was of course .. no… well.. America has proven us wrong .. the way you sell the goodwill is to basically enshittification.. you quickly burn all your brand reputation by lowering your costs with shittier products .. your goodwill goes to 0 but your income increases so stock go up .. the CEO gets a fat bonus for it .. even tho the company itself is destroyed .. then the CEO quickly abandons ship and does the same on their next company .. rinse and repeat… infinite money!