Michael Burry is betting against AI growth translating into real profits as a whole, not the circular funding.
[0] consider pagerduty, incredibly profitable with little revenue growth. Trading at 1.5X revenue, where high revenue growth, unprofitable companies are trading at 10X revenue.
The deal allows OpenAI to purchase up to 6GW of AMD GPUs, while AMD grants OpenAI warrants for up to 10% equity tied to performance milestones, creating a closed-loop of compute, equity, and potential self-funding hardware purchases. Circular.
From the announcement per se, AMD's stock rose to a level that effectively canceled out whatever liabilities they were committing to as part of the deal, so it was all gravy, despite it being a press release
- "Our coin hit $100M daily volume, get on this rocketship before it's too late!"
- "Our exchange does $1B annually, so you know we're trustworthy!"
- "Hey investors, look at the massive demand for our GPUs (driven by the company we invested $100B)!"
Its generating the facade of activity, the same.
You are right theres no public ledger for the wash trading, but the fact that the underlying real physical asset is NVIDIAs product, lends the same intentional activity: to leverage apparent markeet activity to inflate the value of assets.
Second order effects are that everyone serviced by AI today will need even more AI tomorrow. Nvidia is there for that. They're increasing AI proliferation.
By increasing the number of engineers, dollars, watts spent on GPU, Nvidia grows its market.
The added benefit here is that Nvidia gets to share in the upside if any of these companies succeed in their goals.
It's as if Microsoft had Azure back before the doctom boom and took investments in Google, Amazon, and Facebook in exchange for hosting them. (And maybe a few misfires, like WebVan.)
This is really smart chess play.
It's not that different to any type of vendor financing. Vendor financing is legit, if done legitimately.
The real story is that Nvidia is accepting equity in their customers as a payment for their hardware. "What, you don't have cash to buy our chips? That's OK, you can pay by giving us 10% of everything you earn in perpetuity."
This has happened before, let's call it the "selling the goose that lays golden eggs scan." You can buy our machine that converts electricity into cash, but we will only take preorders, after all it is such a good deal. Then, after bulding the machines with the said preorder money, they of course plugged the machines in themselves instead of shipping them, claiming various "delays" in production. Here I'm talking about the bitcoin mining hardware when the said hardware first appeared.
Nvidia is doing similar thing, just instead of doing it 100% themselves, they are 10% in by acquiring the equity in their customers.
even better, we take preorders, while we delay for 1 year, we run the ASICs ourselves with way outsized TH/s power compared to the world. Once we develop the next one, we release the 'new' one to the public with 1/10th of the power.
There's a lot of "shoulds" that go out the window when you're basically in a hype cycle. We're high stakes rolling at this point. It's a matter of when the house goes broke.
>Michael Burry is betting against AI growth translating into real profits as a whole, not the circular funding.
One can lead to the other.
Is that bad? Depends. Did the purchase of chips make sense. Would they have done that if someone else say an independent entity invested?
Their shares have been tanking for a month, even after a very good earnings report, so perhaps the market seeks a little more diversity?
/not an investing/finance/anything to do with money expert.
"Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly."
-- Ernest Hemingway
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-10-07/openai-s-...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/04/nvidia-has-a-cash-problem-to... -- Actually "Cash and short-term investments", not sure what is included in that, but I don't think it includes these major deals.
Also, "the asset" here means stocks of a company that is losing billions dollars per year. OpenAI has no clear path to become profitable, especially given the fact that Google has just leaprfroged them with their Gemini 3 model.
And how inflation and interest are accounted.
> Michael Burry is betting against AI growth translating into real profits as a whole, not the circular funding.
It's not even so much that he's betting against that translating into profits, but rather that the pace of infrastructure investments is too out of sync with the timeline of realizing those profits, and also that throwing money at the problem doesn't necessarily move that break-even ROI timetable forward in a sustainable way (beyond a certain point).
That's what popped the DotCom bubble. It was the fundamental fallacy that potential profits and revenues were directly proportional to and/or dependent on investment, and even more specifically that more investment would realize not just greater returns, but the belief that more investment yielded greater return sooner which just wasn't true - at least not beyond a certain point. So while many people associate the Pets.com flop with the dotcom bubble, it was actually over investment in and by Cisco (chiefly, but not solely) that really precipitated the bubble bursting.
A lot of people see lots of parallels with the AI bubble in that context. If the ROI timeframe is greater than the viable lifecycle of hardware bought today, how wise is it to spend big today? Does it accelerate the timeframe if you spend more, and if so by how much, and up to what point? There's also something to be said about market momentum and strategic positioning, but that's hard to quantify, especially in the context of forecasting how impactful it will be on realizing your ROI at some indefinite point in the future.
Circular thing is bad too but from a different angle, Imagine if the whole TPU vs GPU thing erodes Nvidia's moat and its profit margins compress. if that happens how long it can keep feeding the same unproductive 'pets.AI' type startups? one break in the narrative and tragedy of commons strikes. will it happen soon? anybody's guess but given Trump is at helm and there is going to be new Fed chief, I doubt it would be anywhere near soon. Definitely not before mid-terms are locked in.
Its about keeping Wall Street bubble momentum, not financials.