Cisco was over 400 at one point and Nvidia is around 30. Not quite the same.

Other players today: - Digital Realty 48x - Equinix 75x - CoreWeave (still losing money)

There is likely a bubble of some type here, but I don't think this is the same as the Dotcom bubble.

And some others might need to pull out when its down.

Money doesn't appear out of thin air.

Why would it lead to recession if a handful of big companies lose money they have?

It will show that the USA is in a recession for sure, but otherwise

It will likely take a few years for supply to fully catch up, which means xAI will eat well for a while.

I can see a world where a few data centers come on line this year and reduce margins a bit, but it's crazy to think the margins will go to "cost of electricity plus a few percent" anytime soon.

It's a fairly sweet deal for everyone involved. Anthropic/Google get to sell more tokens and xAI gets a war chest for another bite at the apple. I don't have much confidence that they'll do anything with it but that doesn't mean these deals don't make sense for them.

US is a near monopoly of this pairing. A crash will result in the removal of the fluff and ocerpricing of it all but the stance is beyond strong.

Unless China outcompetes Nvidea AND TSMC AND magically gets 4x cheaper energy they are in a much weaker stance for the long haul.

Nvidia goes back to being a 100 billion dollar business and everyone else reaps the benefits of cheap tokens.

The scenario I see is write-offs. At the moment there are hundreds of billions in IOUs being passed around, much more in liabilities than Lehman had back then in 2007. Compounding that is the frankly insane valuation - it's as clear as day that at least one of the major AI shops will go bust, they all run at a (huge) loss and sooner or later, one of them will run out of cash before achieving market dominance.

Unfortunately, OpenAI and Anthropic are valued at almost 1 trillion $ - backed by nothing but the hope on the winner surviving and achieving the classic VC-backed near-monopoly. The staff can be poached, they don't hold much in IP like patents, the servers and GPUs are mostly owned by third parties like AWS, Microsoft, Google or Oracle - once the cash runs out, they can't sell any assets for even some runway extension because there are no assets. Even the model weights and training data aren't worth much - all competitors already have training data sets of their own, it does not make sense to acquire further data, and model weights are being rendered obsolete by the constant churn of open-weight models particularly from China.

SpaceX is valued even higher, but unlike the other two candidates, they still at least got a viable business even if the entire AI BS bubble collapses, Starlink is a money printer and there's no alternative in sight that matches SpaceX and their reusable rockets.

Now, if either of the three even experiences a large drop in valuation for whatever reason, it's not just experienced VCs that can readily afford (and expect) investments to fail, but this time a lot of "everyday" investment vehicles (such as pension funds) will have to issue write-off losses, and now that they are publicly traded, that may also trigger stop-loss cascade orders further dropping prices, and retail investors will probably join in on the mass panic. That's the #1 risk IMHO.

The #2 risk is that after a collapse, the service providers (i.e. the ones owning the servers) will be sitting on a ton of hardware that has nowhere near recouped its cost. AWS, MS and Google can probably repurpose most of the hardware for their own use and rent out what remains, but they will have to eat significant accounting losses, provoking again a drop in their stock price, but this time with even more blast radius as all three of them are established stock index (and thus ETF) members that a looooot of people have exposure to. But someone like Oracle? They might actually get fried for good.

And the #3 risk is further downstream, particularly relating to NVDA. They have enjoyed years of insane profits because they are the only ones making high-performance AI chips. When demand for new chips collapses due to the event(s) I just described, they can easily shift their TSMC production slots back to GPU wafers and sell these to gamers - but at a far lower profit than before, which again can trigger stock price drops and write-offs.

I won't go further downstream - TSMC and their suppliers are IMHO pretty safe because there is just so much pent up demand from everything not AI, and the construction companies building datacenters don't have too much of a blast radius when the big guns stop expansion projects.

The concrete scenario I'm really, really afraid of: all three succeed with their IPOs, maybe they all survive a year and get included even in S&P 500. The existing shareholders and insiders all slowly dump a lot of their vested stock onto the public market, which in cleartext means into the dozens of billions of $ of retirement contributions. One day, the bubble bursts for whatever reason. The stock markets drop in a panic sell-off, either triggered by stop-loss orders or because retail investors are a herd of sheeple (just like in the 1st covid lockdown). Eventually, circuit breakers on the stock markets will trigger (just like they did in the GME post-apes collapse) and trading will pause, but it will resume until the markets have adjusted to the new valuation... and once the dust clears up, there will be a lot of blood on the floor. Possibly even riots, depending just how much retirement assets just got wiped out.

Eh. There's too much money. Covid response involved printing a lot of money and it all ended up somewhere. The chaos of the current administration has made everything considerably harder to price and the coincidental rise of the LLM has put us in strange situation that is legitimately difficult to price things correctly.

Also, selling shares puts them in a better position to survive a downturn (more cash, less debt).

Whatever financial games they play in the background, doesn't matter when you make that much per 2 quarters alone.

It was definitely a smart business move. It should be troubling to any shareholder than xAI is unable to utilize this infrastructure as renting it out to competitors.

More like $75/mo per user for the next 5-10 years if they can get 5% of the global population to pay that.

So is "unprofitable on inference".

Thankfully we should find out for real as soon as those S-1 documents arrive.

Circular investing is a thing that is happening with all of these companies related to language models. Google hoping for a ROI isn't a great example of that.

See "M2SL" or "TOTBKCR" on tradingview if you want to see inflation live.

Note that a pension plan that invests for you blindly is no better - either the returns are so bad that they are a scam, or they are investing in stocks anyway and so you get the same results but less control. Similar for things like social security, they are either worse options or you need to pump stocks.

We are not going to come up with a market-based solution to fix income inequality. The solution, as much as people in the dwindling middle class resist it, is a strong social safety net coupled with a hard reset on taxation and housing policies. Nobody should be homeless, nobody should be allowed to starve, but you might have to accept that your 401K goes down in exchange for a government guarantee of housing and food.

This is hard for people to accept because they currently have equity in their home or a 401K to save them from starving. But those are transient, individualistic solutions. You can lose your house. You can lose your 401K. Society should be taking care of each other in a broader way than letting everyone accumulate a little, private pile of money.

Just look at these charts: they were declining when inflation was raging on in 2022-23 …