Hacker News Reader

Comment by cdrnsf | Hacker News Reader

Their debt load and infrastructure costs compared to their relatively meager earnings and widespread public distrust is concerning, no?

View on HN

Who is "they"? NVIDIA? Google? Anthropic?

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google selling equity for the first time since their IPO, all of the downstream consumers of the frontier labs. NVIDIA is perhaps the only one profiting from actually selling something. Who hits a liquidity event before the house of cards blows over?

The original claim was "Their debt load and infrastructure costs compared to their relatively meager earnings..." which is just obviously not applicable to Google and NVIDIA, which both crank out more than $100 billion per year in profits. They can literally take on almost a trillion dollars each in debt to finance data centers and still be in reasonably good financial shape.

OpenAI and Anthropic are not very profitable (yet!), but rely mostly on equity financing, not debt. So no debt load issue there either.

Oh, wonderful! OpenAI and Anthropic's structural inability to earn a return for there investors should be no problem.

What is NVIDIA's outlook should their customers' funding run out? Or what's the long tail outlook on Google killing its search product?

Google search only dies if AI wins, in which case there's no shortage of demand for tokens. NVIDIA's revenue just doubled year-over-year; even if token demand cools off and they slow to say 25% growth, they'll be fine.

OpenAI and Anthropic not making money would be sad for their shareholders, but that's sort of a different topic from whether the "debt load" you originally cited will be any kind of a systemic problem (it won't).

Onward to robot god nirvana, the dead red rock in the sky and all that then.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com