Too many people talk about a bubble almost wish-casting that such a thing will make this all go away. It’s probably safest to assume your political enemies won’t be hoisted on their own petard anytime soon.
So let's bet on sunken cost fallacy? That didn't work out during the dotcom era.
When people talk about the bubble is mostly about ending the LLM hype, not making everything associated just disappear. The infrastructure, ideas and developments will stay and probably end up being a lot more useful without the noisy hype surrounding it right now.
Here’s the stupid thing about that infrastructure: This isn’t railroads. This isn’t skyscrapers. This isn’t underseas fiber optic. These are, at the end of the day, data center GPUs that can and will start failing en-masse on normal hardware timelines.
When that happens, they will all need to be replaced, at whatever rate NVIDIAs selling at - or can sell at, if there’s any geopolitical incidents. If there aren’t enough customers, capacity shrinks, and the remaining customers must foot the bill for the new system and the previous round of investment, causing a death loop wherever there isn’t profitable use feeding into the system.
A clearer comparison: It’s like if airlines had to replace their entire fleet every 3-4 years while selling $20 tickets to anywhere; and the growth metrics look incredible when everyone’s flying at that rate. So much so, that investors paid for the first fleet round calling it “infrastructure.” Meanwhile the amount of ticket sales keeps growing when everyone finds amazing use cases and new business models from the $20 tickets. Surely, this can only get better from here, and justifies even more fleet investment.
The top 10 holdings for VTI, the "easy button" investment option. Are: NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Broadcom, Google, Tesla, Berkshire Hathaway. They represent a third of US market value, and 60% of them are heavily hooked into AI. A panic will be a decimation for NVIDIA, and that splash zone will be broad.
I personally account for that in my planning. But many folks have their money in 401k funds in generic broad market securities -- often with high fees on top of it!
How is that? RSP and VIG look very different.
RSP definitely performs better and doesn’t shut you out of the growth stocks.
The infrastructure being there might also be a problem.
- If there's no breakthrough, and we're only going to make incremental gains, then its wasteful
- If there's a breakthrough, it might turn out a new AI architecture needs either lot less compute, or a different kind of it
Ampere generation A6000’s are still selling used for close to MSRP on eBay. I bought an A4500, used it for a year and then sold it for MORE than I bought it for.
I’ve never seen computer hardware appreciate in value like it is now, even if new cards are still significant upgrades.
If you can keep up software support, the hardware becomes much more valuable both now and later, but this is much harder to do in the consumer space where the software than in the industrial/AI space; I'd say the majority of my PC replacements until I was established financially were the result of software not supporting my hardware (not that it couldn't do the task if there were support, but simply that there was no support), and I should say, too, that in almost every case, I regretted dumping $1k in today-dollars for a single game or application otherwise.
Obviously, the problem's much worse with phones/tablets where most people use them for Cloud activities; people use them for 2-3 years and they go in the trash or their service provider might buy it back essentially as e-waste to be scrapped (despite marketing implications of them being reused to help surgeons in Africa).
Clearly, a lot of people very desperately want AI tech to fail and disappear. And if there is such a strong demand for "tell me that AI tech will fail", then there will be hacks willing to supply.