> Or in other words, it's more expensive to run our applications on a SAAS platform than on our own servers, ...
But isn't this just because the initial up front investment for your existing on prem infrastructure has already been spent, and that they are unlikely to all reach eol at the same time? Over time, won't the cost savings of the cloud model make up for the on prem write-off plus the costs of re architecture-ing for cloud? What sort of workloads do you never see moving to IaaS, where the costs of rearchitecturing are just too high? Any opinion on the new VMW on AWS offering, it's pricing, etc?
You're right. The gaming opportunity for Nvidia is groing to at most grow at a ~20% CAGR through 2022, and this is largely being driven by the international markets. The US gaming GPU market is only growing at low-single-digits for the foreseeable future. The autonomous driving and datacenter opportunity are a completely different story. The datacenter business is already growing at >100% y/y and this market has only just started to kick off about 6-9 months ago. How big it will be in 5 or 10 years is still up in the air, but it looks like it will be massive.
The auto opportunity hasn't picked up yet but it's becoming increasingly clear GPUs will play an integral role in any level 4 or level 5 ADAS vehicle. Both of these markets were a completely neglible portion of the NVDA's story just two years ago.
Today, with the stock up more than 250% in the last 18mo., the implied market size (and market share) estimates in the stock are already pretty ambitious. In my opinion, they're not too ambitious, but the question now becomes, when will it become clear that they are conservative? What will it take? SoftBank has a long time horizon, they're comfortable waiting for when this happens, whether it's in 4 quarters if datacenter growth grows from even these remarkable levels or in 4 years when the autonomous driving market with be beginning to take shape...