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by gizmodo59 142 days ago
Nvda is not the only exception. Private big names are losing money but there are so many public companies seeing the time of their life. Power, materials, dram, storage to name a few. The demand is truly high.

What we can argue about is if AI is truly transforming lives of everyone, the answer is a no. There is a massive exaggeration of benefits. The value is not ZERO. It’s not 100. It’s somewhere in between.
2 comments
dpc050505 141 days ago
The opportunity cost of the billions invested in LLMs could lead one to argue that the benefits are negative.

Think of all the scientific experiments we could've had with the hundreds of billions being spent on AI. We need a lot more data on what's happening in space, in the sea, in tiny bits of matter, inside the earth. We need billions of people to learn a lot more things and think hard based on those axioms and the data we could gather exploring what I mention above to discover new ones. I hypothesize that investing there would have more benefit than a bunch of companies buying server farms to predict text.

CERN cost about 6 billions. Total MIT operations cost 4.7 billions a year. We could be allocating capital a lot more efficiently.

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CrossVR 142 days ago
I believe that eventually the AI bubble will evolve in a simple scheme to corner the compute market. If no one can afford high-end hardware anymore then the companies who hoarded all the DRAM and GPUs can simply go rent seeking by selling the computer back to us at exorbitant prices.
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mikestorrent 141 days ago
The demand for memory is going to result in more factories and production. As long as demand is high, there's still money to be made in going wide to the consumer market with thinner margins.

What I predict is that we won't advance in memory technology on the consumer side as quickly. For instance, a huge number of basic consumer use cases would be totally fine on DDR3 for the next decade. Older equipment can produce this; so it has value, and we may see platforms come out with newer designs on older fabs.

Chiplets are a huge sign of growth in that direction - you end up with multiple components fabbed on different processes coming together inside one processor. That lets older equipment still have a long life and gives the final SoC assembler the ability to select from a wide range of components.

https://www.openchipletatlas.org/

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digiown 142 days ago
That makes no sense. If the bubble bursts, there will be a huge oversupply and the prices will fall. Unless all Micron, Samsung, Nvidia, AMD, etc all go bankrupt overnight, the prices won't go up when demand vanishes.
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CrossVR 141 days ago
That assumes the bubble will burst, which it won't if they succesfully corner the high-end compute market.

It doesn't matter if the AI is any good, you will still pay for it because it's the only way to access more compute power than consumer hardware offers.

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charcircuit 141 days ago
There is a massive undersupply of compute right now for the current level of AI. The bubble bursting doesn't fix that.
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digiown 141 days ago
There is a massive over-buying of compute, much beyond what is actually needed for the current level of AI development and products, paid for by investor money. When the bubble pops the investor money will dry up, and the extra demand will vanish. OpenAI buys memory chips to stop competitors from getting them, and Amazon owns datacenters they can't power.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-10/data-cent...

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