Post #3420048

@blogdiva@mastodon.social @gabrielesvelto@mas.to Huh, interesting question. First thought was the East India Company, but that one was highly extractive, but still tended to follow "normal" commerce (they paid on contracts for things like ships and some goods without needing those companies to buy from them). In some respects, NVidia is also acting like a monopsony, since it's pretty much the sole provider of the GPUs being used by AI centers, with the rest of the high purchases (memory, disk, etc) being tack-on to that. The thing that is really weird is that NVidia is essentially funding their customers to establish it's own market, and I'm hard pressed to come up with an example of any other market doing that. Even some of the most egregious self constructed monopsony markets (Standard oil) actually produced something of value outside of it's own market, which lead to it self-maintaining. ( granted, I'm an amateur history buff, so I expect someone actually versed in this to have a better answer )