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Comment by dormento | Hacker News Reader

The AI companies moat, if any, is hoarding all the hardware so local solutions are no longer cost-effective.

That is impossible to fund. At some point someone will decide to stop throwing money on the firepit that's the current business model and then hardware prices crash back to earth as 60-70% of the global demand disappears overnight.

This is not really sustainable when there is a constant supply of increasingly powerful and efficient hardware.

Right: Capital markets know how to efficiently turn dollars into tokens, even if it means tens of billions invested in new DRAM fabs.

The hardware miniaturization gains have finally dried up, though.

I am pretty certain that the current state of the art silicon feature size won't shrink again for at least another decade or two.

It normally takes about a decade to mature a tech which can create a smaller feature size into something commercially viable for mass production scale, and no further improvements have been in the pipeline for that long now.

So it's like the "next piece" indicator while playing Tetris is just blank.

It is more of a regulatory capture byproduct to prop up an artificial token driven Ponzi scheme.

There is a serious alternative to NVIDIA "AI" hardware dropping out of China in February 2027. There is no moat, but a whole lot of unpaid debts in the near future.

Popcorn ready =3

Which Chinese alternative is that?

Huawei is upgrading its Ascend 950PR (2.8 times an Nvidia H20 performance.)

https://apnews.com/article/huawei-ai-chips-nvidia-superpod-t...

Take it lightly until the benchmarks drop. ymmv =3

I honestly have no expert knowledge about this stuff. What I say is based only on intuition.

  - China is heavily, heavily incentivised to enhance their own chip making
  - Looking at the rate Chinas has expanded into just about every single other
    space, and from quantity to quality, I just think it is impossible that they
    don't compete on equal grounds pretty soon.
  - I don't buy the insurmountable moat of TSMC

>I don't buy the insurmountable moat of TSMC

Very wise, energy constraints are already feeding the hyper-scale gamblers their own hubris. =3

Reminiscent of tank warfare in WW2. The soviet T-34 was not remarkable in any particular way, but the sheer volumes it was produced in made it a very serious enemy to German tanks. As Stalin said "quantity has a quality all of its own".

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