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The entire US economy right now is 7 companies sending a trillion fake dollars back and forth to each other, but it's totally not a bubble according to grampa Powell.
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2025
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I mean, if you add enough circles to your graph, it just shows how the entire economy works. What's the cutoff point where it's an obvious bubble and when it is just normal economics in motion?
The cutoff point is, kind of definitionally, when the circles include economic industries that actually provide needs / major tax revenue etc.
That is the point. For insane investment, these industries are not providing needs, and they're not providing particularly useful commodities, they're generally taking basically as much in subsidies as they're paying in taxes.
Currently we throw a shitton of resources in, we get meager usefulness out, and there's no concrete promise that massively useful resources will ever come out. That's.. what a bubble is. And that's why the graph illustrates it.
Most of these companies DO provide for normal needs and commodities. OpenAi is like the only one there that is solely an AI company. And these companies were profitable before all this.
And all those data centers aren't suddenly useless if this bubble pops. That committing power can be used for other purposes. Unlike the for com bubble where those things were almost entirely digital products hosted on a couple of server racks in a basement somewhere. There a lot of infrastructure being built out here that doesn't just vanish.
Ah yes I'll just eat that Nvidia chip cereal, wear those clothes made by Oracle, live in my house made by Figure AI, and get healthcare (not fake AI slop) from CoreWeave.
Obviously these companies play a (very) marginal role in these industries. Nobody is saying the companies don't do outside of AI that is useful. but the point is an absolutely enormous percentage of money (ie, all the dosh invested in AI) is not doing anything productive in these areas.
We were not in great need of more data centers before the AI bubble. And those centres will be filled with AI tensor chips and not geared toward actual needs. I'm sure they can be partially salvaged, but to think they'll be worth anything near the cost is just silly.