I think we are now seeing some combination of FOMO and fear of holding too long competing against each other. The more news these circular deals NVIDIA is making get, the shakier people are getting about the future of AI. What isn't getting enough press is that Meta and Alphabet are inflating the depreciation cycle of the graphics cards they are buying in these deals, claiming they will be viable longer than 10 years in some cases. They won't. Look what happened with crypto mining. Those graphics cards needed to recoup their value in less than 6 months in most cases. So they will have to continue to pen similar deals every 6 months as a best case in order to stay competitive. It's put OpenAI in the hole to the tune of $300 billion already and that number is growing despite their best efforts to try to control it. The justification NVIDIA is using is that, well once they finish parasitizing these companies for their earnings reports and it becomes apparent to everybody that there is no way OpenAI and Anthropic and any of these other start-ups have to ever meet the obligations in these deals to keep buying more NVIDIA gear and they go under, the debt that NVIDIA is holding in the form of these deals will be worthless, the stock options they got in these deals for companies that don't exist anymore are worthless and the assets they liquidated are a bunch of outdated graphics cards you can't even sell to gamers anymore. So to me, it looks like a strip mining operation. Perhaps realizing that Trump is a fickle mistress, they have decided to just get whatever they can before they cut and run, since who can even predict if they will even be allowed to do business in the US at all next year or the year after that. A few people are getting very rich and it's going to make paupers out of the rest of us. As that reality settles in for people (and it is slowly but surely), I am not sure what is going to be left of a hallowed out tech industry in the next few years as the dust of this spectacular collapse settles. It's very possible NVIDIA won't even exist in a few years. I think it's a sure bet that OpenAI won't survive without a massive bailout. One way or the other, every industry that operates on the reliance of government subsidies eventually ends up collapsing when the will to keep endlessly shoveling money into a fire, burns itself clean out of money. Look at whats happening to the solar industry currently. All it's going to take is one US president that isn't sold on AI's benefits, or even just sold on the idea of continuously bailing out start-ups and the whole house of cards comes down.
