Chapter 208: Graphics Card Famine

"Ugh, it's making me so tempted... Maybe we should sneak in some now?"
A young trader stared at the enticing candlestick chart, his mouth practically watering.
"Dream on!" Liang Haiyuan slapped him on the back of the head.
"Have you forgotten Chairman Su's ironclad rule? All our employees are strictly prohibited from participating in any form of Bitcoin trading. Anyone who violates this rule will be fired!"
From the outside, a Bitcoin exchange is like a lawless Wild West.
But for it to operate legally and sustainably in the long run, the most crucial element is preventing internal personnel from abusing their positions to participate in trading and manipulate prices.
Therefore, Su Hao stipulated that all related employees are strictly forbidden from touching this stuff.
This is a red line; anyone who crosses it is doomed.
“But… I just don’t understand,” the trader scratched his head,
“Since Chairman Su knew Bitcoin would rise like this, why bother opening an exchange?
He could have just poured money in and gone all in, and wouldn’t he be rolling in money by now?”
“That’s a narrow-minded approach, isn’t it? Chairman Su’s level of understanding is beyond the comprehension of us mere mortals.”
Liang Haiyuan cleared his throat and began his performance again,
“The reasons, I guess, are twofold. First, before Bitcoin’s meteoric rise, the market was as shallow as a bathtub.
The market size was too small; even a few hundred billion dollars would have suffocated it, let alone hundreds of billions.”
“Second, if Chairman Su had really swallowed up all the Bitcoin and altcoins on the market at once, would there be anyone left to prop up the price?”
"Can prices keep skyrocketing like this?
We've all become the big players, so who's going to be the suckers?"
"...That makes sense."
"So, we mere mortals shouldn't try to figure out Chairman Su's thoughts. How could you possibly understand them?
What he sees is something we can never reach in our lifetime!
He must have seen something much deeper, which is why he chose the path of opening an exchange.
Look at us now, we haven't done anything, and the exchange fees are pouring into our company's pockets like a floodgate has been opened!"
The employees who were worried about the company going bankrupt and losing their jobs when it first opened are now incredibly busy, even starting to clamor for hire.
At this rate, Fanghuan Exchange will definitely become another 24/7 money-printing machine for the group!
At the department's morning meeting the next day, the topic of conversation turned to this:
"Chairman Su, what do you estimate... the reasonable price level for Bitcoin would be?"
Instantly, all eyes in the office focused on Su Hao.
"I think..."
Su Hao hesitated for a moment.
To be honest, from his normal logical perspective, a price of one thousand US dollars was already ridiculously high.
But his years of experience navigating the capital markets had taught him a simple rule:
The prices of many things in this world, especially in the capital markets, once they go crazy, never follow any logic.
He didn't speak, but silently began to calculate in his mind.
An inexplicable intuition began to surface in his mind.
He was like a highly sophisticated detector, scanning for future possibilities.
Two thousand, three thousand, four thousand, five thousand…
A deathly silence fell. His intuition remained utterly unmoved, like a bottomless well.
Just as he began to wonder if he had set his target price too high and should have lowered it…
“…?”
The instant he mentally wrote down ten thousand dollars, an extremely faint, almost imperceptible “intuition,” like a feather gently brushing against his heart, quietly arrived.
‘More than ten thousand dollars?’
Su Hao’s heart leaped. What a joke!
Reaching ten thousand dollars was already enough to drive the entire world mad.
Yet, the feedback from his intuition was still so weak!
This could only mean one thing—this price was far from the end!
The true peak was much higher than this number!
'What about... twenty thousand dollars?'
A thought flashed through his mind, and he abruptly doubled the number in his mind!
However, the feedback from his intuition remained weak, like hearing a mosquito buzzing hundreds of meters away.
Thirty thousand...forty thousand...fifty thousand...
He numbly added the numbers up, but the intensity of the feedback remained unchanged.
It felt like throwing a stone into a bottomless well; you could only hear its faint whooshing sound, but never the echo of its landing.
An unprecedented sense of fear began to spread in his heart.
"Where the hell is this thing going to go?!"
***
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world.
This unprecedented Bitcoin frenzy has sparked a global gold rush among miners, and also created a massive "graphics card famine."
And mining requires a core piece of equipment—the GPU, or graphics card.
Logically, graphics card manufacturers should be laughing all the way to the bank.
However, in the office of CEO Jason Huang at the headquarters of VNVIDIA, the absolute leader in the global GPU market, holding 80% of the market share, the atmosphere was oppressively tense.
Logically, he should be happy.
VNVIDIA's stock price has soared, and its warehouses are completely sold out of graphics cards.
But now, this man who controls 80% of the global GPU market is bleeding inside.
"We're at our limit! We've reached our limit!" an executive reported, his face pale.
"If this continues, we won't even be able to guarantee normal production of our upcoming new generation 'X-Force' series graphics cards!"
The Bitcoin craze directly triggered a global GPU shortage.
Vivint's stock price soared, and its inventory was snapped up.
But the problem was, neither the existing product lines nor the next-generation flagship could be manufactured.
"What's going on at TSMC? Is it really impossible to deliver any chips at all?"
Jenson Huang rubbed his throbbing temples and asked in a low voice.
"It's more than just being unable to deliver. First, the port explosion destroyed a large portion of our stockpiled goods; that was already a heavy blow.
Even worse, now TSMC's air routes are blocked by Chinese aircraft, and its sea routes are completely shut down."
"I heard that TSMC can't get the raw materials, so even if they wanted to produce, they're out of resources."
Damn it!
Jenson Huang felt like his head was about to explode.