Nvidia Starts Pac as AI Chip Maker Builds DC Influence Force(news.bgov.com) |
Nvidia Starts Pac as AI Chip Maker Builds DC Influence Force(news.bgov.com) |
Hardly surprising to see a company with strategic interests strategically try to achieve them. A business exists to make money, and if pulling policy levers is required to make money, you'll see them try to pull the levers.
Reverse Citizens United and you solve these kind of problems at the source.
I think he laid it out very clearly, but never found traction to try to change this (I don't think US Congress wants to be changed, though).
A lot of the "lobbying" is not really pressure groups, it's sort of a corporate-financed knowledge base congressmen can ask questions when they want to understand like, how to expand the semiconductor manufacturing base in their state. Of course it's not all altruistic on the PAC's part, but it is seen positively by individual congressmen because it solves a real need on their side they can't meet with underpaid 24 year old staffers.
This is the endpoint of that effort and the people who pushed it most likely knew what they were doing.
That is the antithesis of how politics should function (people are the interest, not moneyed companies)
When pursing a core mission, many corps fail, either because lack of resources, or mission itself is not meaningful, execution failure, etc.; the fortunate few, might be in growth, while their mission keeps self-reinforce into bigger and bigger scope, that's the wonderful time of growth driven by meaningful mission.
When the core mission is done. The corp resets.
Vast majority of them make profit that is small enough that the normal corporate logic prevail, and they behave normally, primarily to survive.
Extremely rarely, when the core mission is so meaningful, the corp reaps so large a profit, and so many stakeholders are attracted, that they no longer focus on core mission, they start to focus on profit.
That's why NVDA is now buying assets across the whole stack of AI, while still increase price to maintain its profit. NVDA wants to maximize profit.
The inherent flaw is that private corp in US system, has no meaningful end game when they are in this state of astronomical profit.
Mark Hanna was a political consultant in the late 1800's, in the US.
Source: https://quote.org/quote/there-are-two-things-that-are-import...
Then the company invests in operations to scale the success they are having.
Then the company invests in accounting and finance to squeeze costs and move numbers around, so they can make line go up without physically doing anything.
Then the company invests in lawyers to attack competition and defend their business from attacks.
Finally, the company invests in lobbying to shape the rules such that they don't even have to do any of the above four to make line go up.
That's true.
Although, the fact remains that any large corp in US, eventually becomes too big to make sense to pursue their core mission.
Essentially, NVDA does not need this much profit to continue its core mission or try to expand the scope into more meaningful ventures. But profit seeking inevitably would make them to go blindly.
They'll find reasons to do that, as profit itself is non-binding to any particular person, ideology, principles etc.
I mean you can dislike PACs but it's pretty delusional to assume most people think they are categorically bad. Clearly there is an echo chamber here.
And to be clear, NVIDIA started a PAC, not a super pac.
PAC approval (by Public Affairs Council Pulse):
- 2020: 55% overall (Dem 57%, Rep 61%)
- 2021: 53% overall (Dem 58%, Rep 56%)
- 2023: 51% overall
[1] https://pac.org/impact/democrats-pro-business-republicans
[2] https://pac.org/poll-americans-concerned-about-honesty-openn...
AMD also ships CDNA, which is a legitimate competitor to Nvidia's hardware (albeit not a CUDA replacement). Breaking up Nvidia into B2C and B2B portions would probably end up killing CUDA in the consumer GPUs (which enthusiasts rely on), and send the value of datacenter GPUs skyrocketing even further. Nvidia's competitors wouldn't benefit from that.