I get it, there are nuances for tech-bros who are deep in the weeds. Everyone has an anecdote about why I’m wrong.
Take a step back and be a commodity-bro who’s seen enough supply/demand cycles. Tokens are a commodity. Currently, the token factories are out-stripping token demand. Pricing is the adjustment factor. Except token factories are mostly fixed-price businesses. They have take-or-pay. They have commitments. They will produce tokens at a loss rather than turn off.
I’m not saying that token demand is slowing. It’s still growing at astronomical rates. I’m saying that token production is now out-pacing demand. The cycle will turn when demand accelerates or token production slows. There’s like half a trillion $ of GPUs waiting to be installed. I don’t think token production slows anytime soon.
Yeah, I get it. Jevon’s and all. It’s great for AI consumers and innovators. But the guys owning token factories are gonna all go bust in the process, and that’s like $2T of capex to date. You cannot even restructure these things and crush the debt. They’re just stranded by new, and more efficient chips. They’re always going to be stranded by new chips. More efficient Models will strand the more expensive ones. It’s a race to the bottom against fixed costs. It’s the most godawful business misallocation I’ve seen in a while. Makes the Chinese look like prudent capital allocators🤣🤣
It’s like having iron rails when the new railroads run on steel. This bankruptcy cycle will be epic…
In a normal functioning ecosystem, when the price of tokens drops below the cost of production, the quantity of tokens declines to normalize with pricing. In this case, nothing in AI has any unit economics and you don’t see normalization because everyone is still going full-speed ahead with external funding. (Sort of like shale oil in 2016-2019). Meanwhile, compute prices are based on LT contracts that were signed at above market prices, and are now capital destructive. They’ll eventually catch down to token prices in free-fall.
What we’re seeing here is spot price negatively diverging from term pricing. Usually, when this happens in a cyclical industry, it’s INCREDIBLY BEARISH. Especially when there are take-or-pay contracts that make it difficult to ration supply at prices below cost. What we’re witnessing is a world where losses will accelerate, just as more supply comes online….