What could stop the Nvidia frenzy?
什么可以阻止 Nvidia 的狂热？

IF today’s stockmarkets have their version of the great wildebeest migration, it is the stampede of the Nvidia bulls. Wall Street is no Serengeti, and Jim Cramer’s high-pitched narration no match for the dulcet tones of Sir David Attenborough. But in other respects investors’ headlong rush into the American chipmaker’s shares has been every bit as enthralling a spectacle.
如果今天的股市出现了角马大迁徙的版本，那就是英伟达多头的踩踏事件。华尔街不是塞伦盖蒂，吉姆·克莱默高亢的叙述也无法与大卫·阿滕伯勒爵士悦耳的语调相媲美。但在其他方面，投资者对这家美国芯片制造商股票的疯狂抢购同样令人着迷。

Galloping sales of Nvidia’s artificial-intelligence (AI) processors have lifted its market capitalisation from $350bn at the start of 2023 to $1trn, then $2trn, and then, this summer, $3trn. In June it overtook Microsoft, an AI-zealous software giant believed to be the biggest buyer of its chips, as the world’s most valuable firm. It proceeded to lose that title—and $900bn in value—amid the recent stockmarket panic, only to claw back most of its losses in the past few weeks. As the firm prepares to report its latest results on August 28th just about everyone expects another blow-out quarter. “How much money have you made over the years betting against Jensen Huang?” Mr Cramer asked rhetorically on his CNBC show last week, referring to Nvidia’s boss. These days the Nvidia bear appears to be an endangered species. Or, as Sir David might whisper, “Not an Ursus nvidiaensis in sight.”
Nvidia 人工智能 ( AI ) 处理器的迅猛销售使其市值从 2023 年初的 3500 亿美元升至 1 万美元，然后是 2 万美元，然后是今年夏天的 3 万美元。六月，它超越了微软，一家热衷于人工智能的软件巨头，据信是其芯片的最大买家，成为全球最有价值的公司。在最近的股市恐慌中，它失去了这一头衔，并失去了 9000 亿美元的价值，但在过去几周内收复了大部分损失。当该公司准备于 8 月 28 日公布最新业绩时，几乎所有人都预计将迎来另一个井喷季度。 “你这些年做空黄仁勋赚了多少钱？”克莱默上周在CNBC节目中反问，他指的是英伟达的老板。如今，英伟达熊似乎已成为濒临灭绝的物种。或者，正如大卫爵士可能低声说的那样，“看不到熊。”

For every hedge fund that trims its stake in the company, another seems to do the opposite. Of the 74 Wall Street analysts who cover Nvidia and are tracked by Bloomberg, 66 advise buying more of its shares; none suggests selling. Their average price target for the stock one year from now implies a market value of around $3.5trn. James Anderson, a veteran tech investor who was an early backer, teases that Nvidia could be worth $49trn in a decade, a shade more than the total value today of the S&P 500 index of large American firms. All it would take is consistent annual sales growth of 60% at current operating margins of 60% or so, plus some plausible assumptions about cashflow. (Mr Anderson’s current employer, Lingotto, is owned by Exor, the biggest shareholder of The Economist’s parent company.)
每有一家对冲基金削减其在该公司的股份，另一家对冲基金似乎就会采取相反的做法。在彭博社追踪研究英伟达的 74 名华尔街分析师中，有 66 名建议购买更多该公司股票；没有人建议出售。他们对该股票一年后的平均价格目标意味着市场价值约为 3.5 万亿美元。詹姆斯·安德森 (James Anderson) 是一位资深科技投资者，也是早期的支持者，他开玩笑说 Nvidia 的价值可能在十年内达到 49 万亿美元，略高于美国大型公司标准普尔500 指数今天的总价值。所需要的只是在目前 60% 左右的营业利润率下，年销售额持续增长 60%，再加上一些关于现金流的合理假设。 （安德森先生目前的雇主 Lingotto 由《经济学人》母公司最大股东 Exor 所有。）

Investment bankers at Jefferies, Goldman Sachs and UBS project that Nvidia’s yearly revenues will double this year, to over $100bn, grow by as much as half in 2025 and by double digits until at least 2027. By then its operating profit could exceed $150bn—a third more than Apple, tech’s most successful money-spinner, managed last year. The numbers are getting so big, so fast, that this alone should give the bulls pause. As they catch their breath, they might wish to ruminate on two contradictions lurking in Nvidia’s long-term growth story.
杰富瑞 (Jefferies)、高盛 (Goldman Sachs) 和瑞银 (UBS)的投资银行家预计，英伟达今年的年收入将翻一番，达到 1000 亿美元以上，到 2025 年将增长一半，至少到 2027 年将实现两位数增长。到那时，其营业利润可能会超过 1500 亿美元——比科技界最成功的赚钱公司苹果公司去年的管理水平高出三分之一。这些数字变得如此之大、如此之快，仅这一点就应该让多头停下来。当他们喘口气时，他们可能希望思考一下英伟达长期增长故事中潜藏的两个矛盾。

The first concerns its main supplier. Nvidia designs chips but does not produce them. That falls to TSMC, a Taiwanese contract chipmaker that dominates the market for the cutting-edge silicon that goes into AI servers. As demand for these has rocketed, Nvidia has gone from one among many of TSMC’s clients to probably its second-biggest behind Apple. If it is indeed “customer B”, one of two that represent at least 10% of TSMC’s revenues and must thus be disclosed in regulatory filings, it spent $7.7bn with TSMC last year, up from $5.5bn two years earlier. Given that most of Nvidia’s purchase commitments of $19bn for 2025 are likely to end up with TSMC, it could soon eclipse the current “customer A”, which handed the Taiwanese firm just shy of $18bn in 2023.
第一个涉及其主要供应商。英伟达设计芯片但不生产芯片。这落在了台积电的手中，这是一家台湾代工芯片制造商，在人工智能服务器的尖端芯片市场上占据主导地位。随着对这些产品的需求猛增，英伟达已经从台积电的众多客户之一变成了仅次于苹果的第二大客户。如果确实是“客户B ”（占台积电收入至少 10% 的两个客户之一，因此必须在监管文件中披露），那么它去年在台积电的支出为 77 亿美元，高于两年前的 55 亿美元。鉴于英伟达 2025 年 190 亿美元的采购承诺中的大部分最终可能会落到台积电手中，它可能很快就会超过当前的“客户A ”，后者在 2023 年向这家台湾公司提供了接近 180 亿美元的资金。

Even as Nvidia’s and TSMC’s fates become more entwined, however, their product cycles are diverging. Earlier this year Mr Huang vowed to launch a new and improved AI chip every year, rather than every couple of years. TSMC is therefore in a mad rush to expand capacity, pledging to invest up to $32bn this year and possibly more in 2025. But it still needs at least 18 months to erect a new factory. And because these can cost $20bn a pop, careful discussions with clients typically start a year or two in advance. It is unclear how Nvidia’s accelerated timeline fits in with TSMC’s more measured pace of decision-making. In an early sign of trouble, Nvidia has delayed shipments of its latest chips, called Blackwell, by a couple of months owing to technical kinks.
然而，尽管英伟达和台积电的命运变得更加紧密相连，但它们的产品周期却出现了分歧。今年早些时候，黄先生发誓每年都会推出一款新的、改进的人工智能芯片，而不是每隔几年。因此，台积电疯狂扩张产能，承诺今年投资高达320亿美元，2025年可能还会投资更多。但建设新工厂仍需要至少18个月的时间。由于这些项目的成本可能高达 200 亿美元，因此通常会提前一两年开始与客户进行仔细讨论。目前尚不清楚英伟达的加速时间表如何与台积电更加谨慎的决策节奏相适应。由于技术问题，英伟达已将其名为 Blackwell 的最新芯片的发货推迟了几个月，这是麻烦的早期迹象。

Nvidia’s reliance on TSMC also highlights the second tension in the bulls’ case. Because the manufacturer controls the volume and efficiency of production, the only way for Nvidia to ensure that it meets investors’ bullish expectations for sales is to raise prices. A Blackwell chip will cost 20-25% more than the earlier generation, which was twice the price of the one before. Each chip is more powerful than the last, so the cost per unit of computing power is probably declining. But not fast enough for customers.
英伟达对台积电的依赖也凸显了多头案件中的第二个紧张局势。由于制造商控制着生产的数量和效率，因此英伟达确保满足投资者对销售的乐观预期的唯一方法就是提高价格。 Blackwell 芯片的成本将比上一代芯片高出 20-25%，是前一代芯片价格的两倍。每个芯片都比上一个更强大，因此每单位计算能力的成本可能正在下降。但对于客户来说还不够快。

In August Andy Jassy, chief executive of Amazon, whose cloud-computing arm is a big user of Nvidia chips, acknowledged that he had “heard loud and clear from customers that they relish better price performance”. His company is investing in its own designs. So are Google, Meta, Microsoft and Tesla. AMD, a rival chip-designer, has gone from almost no AI-chip sales in 2022 to a forecast $5bn this year. On August 19th it said it would buy ZT Systems, a server maker, helping it to compete with Nvidia’s end-to-end offering. Chinese tech champions such as Huawei, barred by American sanctions from procuring top-end Nvidia gear, may forge breakthroughs that could do to Nvidia’s market share what Chinese competitors like BYD did to Tesla’s in electric cars.
亚马逊首席执行官安迪·贾西（Andy Jassy）承认，他“从客户那里清楚地听到，他们喜欢更好的性价比”。亚马逊的云计算部门是英伟达芯片的大用户。他的公司正在投资自己的设计。谷歌、Meta、微软和特斯拉也是如此。其竞争对手芯片设计公司AMD 的AI芯片销售额从 2022 年几乎没有销售额上升到今年的预测 50 亿美元。 8 月 19 日，该公司表示将收购服务器制造商ZT Systems，帮助其与 Nvidia 的端到端产品竞争。华为等中国科技巨头因美国制裁而被禁止采购英伟达高端设备，它们可能会取得突破，对英伟达的市场份额产生影响，就像比亚迪等中国竞争对手在电动汽车领域对特斯拉的影响一样。

Exit pursued by a bear
出口被熊追赶

Assuming a killer app eventually emerges—which it hasn’t yet—generative ai is unlikely to become widely used unless it gets much cheaper; a ChatGPT query can cost seven times more to answer than Google search. Nvidia may soon have to choose between lowering prices to support its growth or maintaining prices to protect its profit margin. For now Nvidia bulls think they can have it both ways. The whiff of irrational exuberance may become too overwhelming for U. nvidiaensis to resist. ■
假设一款杀手级应用最终出现（目前还没有出现），生成式人工智能不太可能得到广泛使用，除非它变得更便宜；回答 Chat GPT查询的成本可能是 Google 搜索的七倍。英伟达可能很快就必须在降低价格以支持其增长或维持价格以保护其利润率之间做出选择。目前看好英伟达的人认为他们可以双管齐下。非理性繁荣的气息可能会让恩维迪亚人难以抗拒。 ■