[smw]

I have lots of skepticism about everything involved in this, but on this particular point:

It's a bit like TSMC: you couldn't buy space on $latestGen fab because Apple had already bought it all. Many companies would have very much liked to order H200s and weren't able to, as they were all pre-sold to hyperscalers. If one of them stopped buying, it's very likely they could sell to other customers, though there might be more administrative overhead?

Now there are some interesting questions about Nvidia creating demand by investing huge amounts of money in cloud providers that will order nv hardware, but that's a different issue.

[CoolestBeans]

Its probably not very likely that if a large buyer pulled out, NVIDIA could just sell to other customers. If a large buyer pulls out, that's a massive signal to everyone else to begin cutting costs as well. The large buyer either knows something everyone else doesn't, or knows something that everyone else has already figured out. Either way, the large buyer pulling out signals "I don't think the overall market is large enough to support this amount of compute at these prices at current interest rates" and everybody is doing the same math too.