Suppose NVIDIA ceased to exist today. What would happen? AMD would step in. Huawei would step in. Maybe even Intel eventually. More fab capacity would go to these companies accelerators.

At worse, progress stalls for a year or two.

NVIDIA was at the lead and took most of the revenue and valuation because of it. But the same process would have happened with or without NVIDIA.

Now go back five years and substitute an NVIDIA collapse. Do you think that we'd be in a very different position for AI? I don't think it would be far off at all.

There were many game accelerator companies when NVIDIA started, they were just slightly better than the others, and the efficiency gains of consolidation resulted in those other companies being sold off.

ASML is definitely a one off though. And perhaps TSMC is a unique one off, but they got there by taking the most customers. If it wasn't them, then somebody else would have done it.

The key selection function was "this is the best option at the time" and if the best option hasn't existed, somebody else would have been chosen path that time, giving that other company the capital to build somethjng.

In part, because money is going to these other ventures instead. Where would money go if there weren't an NVDA is the 6T question. What would this world look like with more balanced investment across the SP500 sectors instead of money dumped into this one industry in particular? I don't think it would be more chip companies on a 1:1 basis of NVDA investment. The fact that it is going to a single ticker in this case makes it more likely to suck the other options out of existence. If it were say 100 chip companies, more likely on an individual level than an investor might instead say, maybe this time I would invest in some other industry. Mutual funds that investors buy into to hedge into many sectors are also heavier than ever in tech companies like NVDA sort of perverting the whole concept of these funds in the first place. Sort of unprecedented times between how overlevereged things are, and the constant uninformed pumping of air into these stocks thanks to these packages such as these mutual funds that people automatically contribute their paycheck into, again believing they are probably getting much more broad exposure vs how leveraged these packages are currently.

> selflessness

He's an incredibly accomplished entrepreneur and leader, but I'm not sure what he's done to qualify as selfless.

> If you don't think talent is an issue, why hasn't anyone begun seriously competing with SpaceX, TSMC, ASML?

To quote the late, great philosopher and renowned businessman Eugene Krabs:

"Money."

No they aren't, but it is an example of relative scale of investment. Especially when much of that market cap growth has come just within the last 5-6 years or so. Money could have flowed to other ponds collecting off the river of investor cash flow instead of this one massive lake. This might have lead to a different growth trajectory in our economy and technological development than one so focused on the ROI of chip production in particular, to the exclusion of much else. The fact that much of that demand is brought up by circular investment is another aspect. Two lakes backfeeding into eachother eating more and more of the flow off cash flow river, drying up other ponds along the way. Much is lost with such unitary focus of investment.

It would be really interesting to get a snapshot of the actual dollars spent on ownership at any one point in time. Stock market volume can be a lot of froth and slosh of a small-ish subset of all shares.

No, it isn't measuring the velocity of incoming investment. But it goes to show just how outstandingly large the pile of money on one ticker in particular is, relative to other high tech industries that are even favored by investors for their 10x potential (maybe moreso historically than today albeit).