The funniest part is that the thing that could actually make AI useful at scale might be what wrecks the investment thesis: cheap, local, open weight models. Wall Street funded a trillion dollar server farm to discover that sometimes the answer is a smaller model running on your laptop. The technology might win while the investors lose. Nevertheless, companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft – as well as Nvidia and AMD – are a very long way from simply going under.
this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2026
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Google, Amazon and Microsoft will be fine.
Oracle, though. It's possible they'll actually die. And wouldn't that be tragic.
I think NVIDIA has a higher chance of survival because they’re the ones actually producing something tangible (GPUs) that is still needed even if openweight models prevail.
they're doing far more than just that, the way jensen has been able to structure all almost all of these deals essentially offloading all the risk. they sell essentially lease the hardware, ontop of huge chunk of premium up front, ontop of paying for compute itself, ontop of offloading any actual buildout cost onto any greedy schmuck willimg to pay the tab. nvda will be completely fine (though stock price will obviously correct as bubble-levels income drops)
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they wont be fine, they will suffer heavy lossess but will survive, likely just by laying off hordes tech people, and even downsizing thier warehouses. i think nvidia will get off mostly less harmed though, since they sold thier products years ahead. hopefully it takes down skydance with it.
And whoever scavenges their corpse will milk their ~~customers~~ prisoners even harder!
I doubt it. Government would step in and bail them out.
yep, with our money.
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Too big to fail? I think I heard that once.
I just can't see things continuing like this, there has to be a plateau reached at some point. Higher or lower. Exponential growth isn't sustainable in anything.
Nevertheless, companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft – as well as Nvidia and AMD – are a very long way from simply going under.
Not really, once you look at the startups like OpenAI they have enormous expenses that depend on constant debt and investment funding, and the cost and risk of sustaining that debt can easily reach a point where they struggle to get new investors to foot the bill.
The whole market is based on a belief in a huge pot of gold some time in the future, and it is driven by unfathomable amounts of debt to keep the machinery running towards that goal. Once the belief in the goal getting reached gets broken, the change in momentum breaks the whole system.
That includes the big players, huge amounts of their balance sheets, including claims of revenue, are circular trades between themselves. Even google claims revenue from asset price growth in their AI subsidiaries.
Once it shifts from investment to repaying bad debts the numbers will look completely different for all the big companies involved. We're talking potentially bail outs basically across the board
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Why do you think they are starving consumer market for computer parts?
I think we are talking about the same thing. AI companies spend billions to monopolize compute, causing consumer hardware prices to go up.
lol you’re kidding, right? Have you looked at component prices lately? Have you missed the part about how basically all consumer electronics that use LPDDR are getting price hikes, because the demand for high performance memory has skyrocketed by an order of magnitude in the last few years?
Edit: yeah I realized I was replying to a rhetorical question 🙃
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There is this insane amount of investment in AI built around LLMs that threatens the entire world. People worry about the bubble bursting but think AI is the ant’s pants without considering that the LLM is a dead end. None of the AI companies are going to achieve Artificial Intelligence. That’s why they will actually implode, their systems aren’t intelligent.
I mean, they are artificial intelligence by pretty much any normal definition of that term. So is Battle Chess from the 1980s. So is bank fraud detection. So is Conway's Game of Life in its most basic definition.
Will they develop "super intelligence", etc? No
It wont be a real AI, but itll be just enough to kill off a lot of the software industry.
I'm genuinely curious what "real AI" is to you?
Real ai to me would mean true agency. And an entity which has its own goals and relationship to its world.
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I fear that yes they are not good enough to actually replace labor, but good enough to cause unprecedented chaos. Under capitalism, at least.
I think that's the wrong conclusion. I agree they won't achieve actual intelligence, but I see no reason why that would make them implode. Current tech is still going to be something companies pay a lot for.
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As a financial analyst, Klement’s take on the AI economy has been notably grim — back in May, he penned an article in Reuters arguing that institutional investors shouldn’t be asking “whether the AI boom will end, but what will happen to markets when it does.” Now, his live interview on Bloomberg‘s flagship news channel underscores the degree to which the AI bubble is becoming impossible for mainstream commentators to ignore [...]
What's interesting to me is that people who run Bloomberg have a huge advantage in manipulating the market.
In fact, the story behind the AI boom really has to be how the business press operates, always enabling the upper class to be richer.
Of course, if the Iraq war is any example, there will be a few confessions and nothing will change.
investing in the wrong future
I'm assuming they mean "future" in the same way the stock market (ab)uses the word, because AI had its lower ribs removed on day one. There's no future there.
We've basically got to wait for Anthropic and OpenAI to actually IPO before any of this can get started properly. Once there's a public expectation for profit from the two biggest AI labs, then the market will start acting against them. We can hope, at least.
Once there's a public expectation for profit from the two biggest AI labs
I don't think that it's necessarily the order things will go.
Anthropic and OpenAI have bills to pay, including obligations to pay a ton of money to partners/vendors in the coming years. They need cash to do that. And the cash can come from 3 main places: revenue from customers, loans from lenders (usually in the form of issuing bonds), and issuing new stock/equity to raise funds.
The IPOs are basically their last chance to raise funds by issuing new equity. Even if each of them raise $100 billion, that's probably not enough to hit self sustaining profitability. As lenders start to get more skeptical, in a macroeconomic environment with high interest rates and high energy prices, they start to run into a very real possibility that they hit illiquidity issues, even if their core business model actually works by then (and I don't think it will). There's just not enough runway for them, even in the most optimistic long term projections.