Big tech needs to justify AI spending as investors dump stocks | Hacker News Reader

Big tech needs to justify AI spending as investors dump stocks

bloomberg.com

45 points1vuio0pswjnm714 comments

Is this it, is it finally happening? Is RAM going to become cheaper soon?

I hope the crash, when it comes, won't wipe out peoples pension funds... but I've been charging up my schadenfreude towards the breathless AI hypeboys for a LONG time

Here's to all those crypto bros who traded out of their crypto positions at a loss to trade into the AI bubble.

https://archive.is/20260719133921/https://www.bloomberg.com/...

Big example in the article is Alphabet, so I looked up their stock and it’s up 86% in last 12 months. Incredibly short term article.

But isn't that the nature of bubbles? They go up for a long time, and then they come down very fast.

So the day after the bubble bursts you'd see exactly this: a very recent very sharp drop, preceded by 12 months of solid gains.

also, sometimes when they pop you’re till up 50% after everthing is said and done, even if you’re down 90% from the peak.

the market is like a ponzi scheme, it depends on when you got in

Alphabet's business is in information retrieval, they're probably the only company out of all of them where the defensive AI play is justified

It’s in ads

Also mentioned was Apple, who gets to shrug and carry on... now with fewer manufacturing issues.

Microsoft has to be shaking. For the first time in three-or-so decades they were finally involved in something big when it happened instead of being years behind everyone else. If this crashes they're going to have people jumping out of windows.

> Microsoft has to be shaking

Their stock hasn't really seen much upside from this whole AI thing, so I don't really see how they'd get punished that badly. At least they have a public cloud business where they can rent out capacity to reduce the loss.

Maybe if OpenAI goes bankrupt, they might be punished more. Or it could be an opportunity for them to scavenge. Oracle is a lot more fucked if that happens.

The investment makes sense for a company with a ton of products that naturally integrate with AI. Gemini is how I search these days. and finally Google got me to pay a monthly fee to them, especially with YouTube plus included in the price (for now at least).

I don't think big tech is going to be hurt that much. Or if they hurt, it will be for unrelated business reasons like ad spend going down.

Maybe capacity spend will go down for the time being and the hardware stocks will go down. Maybe a bunch of these startups will go backrupt or get acquired. The defensive play of building out the infrastructure and software stack is probably going to continue. These companies have been playing catch up with nvidia for a while now and won't make that mistake twice.

It's kind of mind blowing how much work remains to be done with these models (e.g. finding ways to integrate them in the rest of the economy, finding more resource efficient ways to run them, ads monetization).

It seems like right now, a lot of stocks like oracle, adobe, IBM, and intuit are getting reevaluated.

I would say this month we are buying expensive personal subscriptions for the people who really need AI and canceling subscriptions for people who really don’t adopt it instead of having Gemini Claude and ChatGPT subscriptions for everyone for all 3. We just have cheap Gemini with google workspace for everyone and high end personal for power users.

Anecdotal but this is the current state at our company.

Anecdotal but

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