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Nvidia and BTC

Following the previous post that Nvidia is the central bank, Nvidia also has an interesting relation with BTC.

As Nvidia and compute technology improve, miners buy newer and more expensive machines to stay competitive. Because everyone can access the same better technology, the advantage is quickly competed away through higher hash rates and mining difficulty.

As a result, miners collectively spend more capital to compete for the same fixed amount of new Bitcoin. Higher industry-wide mining costs mean miners require higher BTC prices to justify that investment, creating upward pressure on the Bitcoin price.

The better the Nvidia mining revenue, the higher the BTC price!

In previous mode: larger nominal economy + more dollars + higher price level -> higher nominal gold price

How similar!

Nvidia is the central bank

Token is an asset.

Your account has a number – the number of tokens you can use.

Those tokens can be used to do anything. You either get what you want from tokens, or you make something out of tokens and sell / exchange it for other stuff.

It’s an asset that is so versatile that is like “money”.

In accounting, money is an asset.

In economy, money is the medium of exchange.

Tokens are like money in those regards.

Token factories are like banks.

The factory prints tokens with electricity.

Nvidia’s servers, at the frontier, determines the speed of inflation.

If Nvidia’s next gen servers are too good and sells cheap, token can be printed fast! Thus the token on hand can be depreciated.

In that sense, Nvdia is like Fed that controls inflation.

Thoughts from people more than 75 year ago

Where is our thought leader these days?

Moreover, if we move in the direction of making machines which learn and whose behavior is modified by experience, we must face the fact that every degree of independence we give the machine is a degree of possible defiance of our wishes. The genie in the bottle will not willingly go back in the bottle, nor have we any reason to expect them to be well disposed to us.

Wiener_Norbert_The_Machine_Age_v3_1949

Meanwhile,

I think affluent middle class is key to a lot of things, especially for the US.

The rise of cheap Chinese open-weight models is a shock, if not an “attack”.

“Middle class” that is merely existing without a lot of options in life is not affluent middle class. Free will doesn’t prevail in this case.

About AMD

1/ OpenAI warrants and target price

OpenAI’s AMD warrant (max 160 million AMD shares) agreement says the first tranche follows delivery of the first 1 GW and full vesting requires purchases reaching 6 GW. AMD also disclosed that the stock-price targets rise to $600 for the final tranche.

AMD last year talked about $20 non-gaap EPS within the next three to five years. And now it says it will be significantly above $20.

Using the Nov 2025 stated goal of $20, OpenAI’s last tranche of $600 is 30x, and given it maybe $30 non-gaap eps, it’s just 20x.

2/ Lisa Su doesn’t own much?

Lisa Su currently owns approximately 3.61 million AMD shares outright, equal to about 0.22% of AMD.

AMD’s March 2026 proxy disclosed that Su also held 413,529 options exercisable within 60 days. Adding those to her currently reported actual shares gives approximately 4 milion beneficially owned shares or approximately 0.247% of AMD.

However, she came as CEO. She is not the founder.

What concerns me (3)

Is that today’s major platforms like X and TikTok/Douyin can be used as “thought weapons”.

People/organizations can push a post (twit or video) to millions of people if it fits their interest, regardless of who creates the post in the first place.

At certain scale and with enough repetitiveness, this action can alter a person’s or a group of people’s thoughts.

This influence is sold.

People/organizations can buy the influence without disclosing the intention.

Common folks are blindfolded.

It’s not like an influencer wants  more people to see his/her posts to grow impact.

It’s paying for “thought weapons” to achieve certain goals inexplicitly.

And sometimes, these goals could be evil, or self-interested.

Meanwhile, users who “owns” the attention “sell” their attention for nothing; payers pay to the platforms – they are not even bribing the ones that have original ownership.

What concerns me (2)

Is that current companies or leader of companies at the frontier of AI and robotics talks about advancement everyday, but they said little about ethics, at least in the public domain.

Who to provide jobs if factories are run by robotics? and decisions are made without human in the loop?

How to preserve humanity in a world with automatic war machines / weapons?

Interesting levels

Security Apr. 30 close Recent bottom close Bottom vs. Apr. 30 Intraday trough vs. Apr. 30
SK Hynix (000660) ₩1.286m ₩1.322m on Jul. 30 +2.8% −3.1% at ₩1.246m on Jul. 29
QQQ $667.74 $661.73 on Jul. 29 −0.9% −1.0% at $661.14
SOXX $461.44 $465.00 on Jul. 29 +0.8% +0.6% at $464.08
SMH $506.72 $504.22 on Jul. 29 −0.5% −0.6% at $503.63

These names bottomed at end of Apr levels.

From capex to backlog

For the past few quarter, capex figures and related comments from hyperscalers are the key metrics to watch, especially for gauging future demand for semiconductor companies.

The higher the capex number, the higher the revenue estimates.

This worked but became less useful lately.

Investors don’t like it if only the capex is growing, which pushes hyperscalers free cash flows to negative territory.

Investors want to see higher demand signal, which can justify these higher capex numbers.

Thus, backlogs or RPOs (emaining performance obligations) are more important now.

 

Quarter AWS backlog Microsoft commercial RPO Google Cloud backlog Oracle total RPO
1Q25 189 315 90 130
2Q25 195 368 106 138
3Q25 200 392 155 455
4Q25 244 625 240 523
1Q26 364 627 462 553
2Q26 496 678 514 638

Another thing to watch is the weighted-average backlog duration of these backlogs – within how many years will backlog become revenue?

Microsoft explicitly commented about 2.3 years.

RPO, including OpenAI, has a weighted average duration of 2.3 years. And roughly 30% will be recognized in revenue in the next 12 months, up 37% year-over-year. The remaining portion recognized beyond the next 12 months increased 112%.

– MSFT FY4q26 earnings call

In addition, utilization is also an indicator.

Amazon said “lion’s share” of AWS compute capacity for 2027 had ⁠already been reserved during 2q26 earning call, which is very good to hear.