Nvidia is probably the only player in the AI bubble with an actual business model. AI is not generating profits. Selling AI hardware very much is.
Nvidia is just concerned it won't continue to be this profitable.
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
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If there's a gold rush, sell shovels!
But then the gold rush ends and everyone has piles of shovels, your shovel investors get mad and demand a new CEO because they thought shovel demand would be that high forever.
And you've pissed off your loyal hobby shovelers who have been with you for decades.
I see how the market is trending, once the shovels sales are projected to drop, I put on my golden parachute and jump out with all those fat fat gold rush bonuses I paid myself, and then it's some other clown's problem. And if they do well, I still make bank from all the stock I awarded myself!
I then take my shovelmaster reputation and find some other place to sell shovels at. Rinse, repeat, etc. It's foolproof!
"selling tulips is obv unsustainable because it's a bubble but selling tulip growing equipment now that's a sustainable business model"
If you were already producing watering cans, yeah, kinda. They're pivoting for pure profit right now, and when the bubble bursts, they'll just go back to selling 2000€ "consumer" GPUs. Maybe they'll sit on some inventory, but the sheer profits at the moment will cover for that.
In a lot of fields, the middle-ground is completely barren.
Audiophiles killed middle of the ground hi-fi systems, now all you can easily get is soundbars, bluetooth speakers, and the ever golden audiophool stuff with healing crystals. Often your best bet is to buy cheap pro audio stuff, a cheap audio interface also gives you a good 48V XLR input, studio headphones are comfortable and don't have BASS BOOST built in, etc.
The same will happen to gaming. You'll be either forced to use an iGPU, or shell out $2000+ for a GAMING GPU with factory overclock and RGB LEDs.
It does have a business model, but that doesn't mean it's going to survive the bubble bursting.
Like, sure, this is selling shovels to gold prospectors. But, they're also accepting loans from the prospectors and giving them shovels in the expectation of being paid back later. Plus they're switching everything they do to shovel selling, and ignoring all previous businesses. I hope everybody with nVidia stock is slowly selling it off while it's at a sky high valuation, because it's going to make a dinosaur-killing crater when the AI bubble pops.
It's the old model of making a profit from selling the gear to gold prospectors, instead of being the gold prospectors.
Then, when the gold prospector fails, you buy the gear back at 10% of the price, and resell it to the next aspiring gold prospector.
The only problem for NVDIA is buying back, and reselling, the used gear.
Hey if an A100 goes up on a used site for 400, I'll buy it.
Nvidia does sells AI focused cards though, they are pretty bad for gaming so they can't pivot them.
It's not like they have massive stockpiles of unsold AI hardware lying around. And their production can switch back to gaming very quickly.
But so long as idiots keep buying AI hardware to chase nebulous AI powered profits, nvidia will continue to chase the very real profits of selling them.
I wonder what the odds are on a government bailout.
Considering somewhere around 37% of the stock market is wrapped up in this, I think it's unfortunately high.
And the American government is currently interested in enriching oligarchs first and doing what’s right for the country only as an accident.
Definitely. The AI bubble is going to burst, the tech companies are going to demand a bailout, and they're going to get it.
And, if you thought the Obama bailout of the banks after the 2007/2008 financial crisis was bad, keep in mind, that bailout was done by competent people, many of whom actually took their role as public servants seriously. The AI bubble bailout will be handled by Don Jr. and Big Balls.
Yep. Too big to fail.
This seems to be the largest resolution.
I'd love it on a T-shirt.
ProTip: With Inkscape, you can copy-paste (hehe) the image, and use "TraceBitmap" Tool!
Basic option gives up an inverse result [1], but with simple trick of putting square under it, and with both objects selected using Path > Difference [2] we get the text itself in SVG format, which is scalable and lossless! [3]
I could send it enlarged but... cmon, u can do it. (and I do not know a good file sharing method, and do not want to use those crapy popular ones)
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter
Why is the symbol backwards?
I believe that is Copyleft.
It also thematically follows in the tradition of hanging flags upside down, writing words or letters backwards, etc. to indicate opposition.
loved this, had the logo on a shirt for years that got transformed into a throw pillow cover... wonder when my wife succeeded in throwing it away without me noticing....hmmm
sounds like it's time for v2.0
yarp
Copyright wars? I'm out of the loop
I had to look it up.
https://www.technollama.co.uk/a-short-history-of-the-copyright-wars
The rise of file sharing, it was a big deal at the time (and the cause of our family PC having about 1000 different types of adware). I didn't realise it had a name. I've never seen that logo though.
A shame it fell out of flavour.
That disregard for copyright from the beginning of the century was essential for the spread of the infrastructure so omnipresent today, celebrated by some of the richest, most powerful people of today, essential for the plans they have for us. Watch it happen live while being entertained for free.
Yep.
IP law is too complicated to explain to the average moron (by which I am including government representatives as well as voters), so for 25 years we've just left it up to a few academics and nerds but mostly multi billion dollar corporation's lawyers to 'figure out'.
I wrote papers on the need for reform of the DMCA back during the GFC era, nobody fucking cared.
Now, we are at the point where Nvidia tried to pay Annas Archive for 500TB of pirated textual works to train their models on, and somehow, only Annas Archive seems to be in any actual legal danger at the moment.
https://dataconomy.com/2026/01/20/claim-nvidia-green-lit-pirated-book-downloads-for-ai-training/
Piracy is essentially explicitly legal with a meaningless 'cost of doing business' fine if you are a multi billion dollar corp, but if you don't directly profit from it, well then that is illegal and you could go to jail for the rest of your life, or be suicided, one way or another, like Aaron Schwartz.
See also:
We need either a corporate death penalty or we need laws that throw the executives of companies that do shit like this in jail for 20 years, and also divest them of all of their wealth, thats the fine now, its all your money and your shit.
But of course, that won't happen without killing about 5,000 people, the corpos who have a chokehold on the US government.
Many many people wouldn‘t even own a digital device if not for free copyrighted content in the naïve 00s. The jolly roger flew in the way of today‘s inescable powers. It turned white long ago.
Similarly to how Trump seems like he's maybe (hopefully) overplaying his hand with the speed and brazenness of his authoritarian overreaches, AI companies simply tried to deskill people too quickly to addict them enough to the "the resemblance of skills on an expensive cloud" machine that is AI.
If they had--like they did with other "platforms"--really addicted the users with something they couldn't get elsewhere for free, allowed them to get comfortable enough to be deskilled, and then done the rug pull they might not be whining right now.
I think the reason this was different is that the models are just inefficient and resource hungry as shit, and the cost of addicting the users by giving it away for free is just too high.
That's where the whining comes in. Come on guys....get addicted!
Hey, you thoughtless piece of shit! How's he going to afford his next private plane if you don't sign up? You're so fucking selfish!
I don't get it.
Could I ask for explanation?
For which part? It’s pretty much all there.
Was that poster about wanting to destroy the entire internet or just something like Napster?
Napster.
Nothing, sorry, already looked it out! Cool design tho
Old quote, same tension between innovation and public trust.