Nvidia has announced A “strategic investment” of up to 100,000 million dollars in Openai. But it is an investment with trap: Openai will use that money to buy Nvidia chips. The semiconductor manufacturer thus becomes the financier of its own most important client.
Why is it important. This maneuver dangerously reminds the “circular financing” schemes that characterized the end of the 2000 Puntocom bubble.
- Companies like Lucent, Nortel and Cisco financed operators as Global Crossing to buy them equipment. We are not the first to see this simile At this stage of AI.
- When the bubble exploded, both suppliers and customers sank into a spiral of debts and overcapacity.
The agreement will allow OpenAI to build data centers with a joint capacity of 10 gigawatts, equivalent to about 10 nuclear reactors. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, has acknowledged that this represents between 4 and 5 million GPUS: “double those we distributed last year.” Brutal scale
In figures. The numbers are astronomical. According to Huang himself in August, creating a 1 Gigavatio data center costs between 50,000 and 60,000 million dollars, of which about 35,000 million are destined for Nvidia chips. With that logic, the 10 projected gigawatts would cost more than 500,000 million dollars.
The bags have reacted with euphoria: Nvidia shares rose almost 4%, adding 170,000 million dollars to their stock market capitalization. Jensen Huang Broza’s company is already 4.5 billion dollars of valuation.
Yes, but. Parallelism with the ‘Puntocom’ bubble is disturbing. These same schemes of ‘Financing vendor‘We already saw them in the final stage of the 2000 technological bubble. They did not end well for any of the parties.
The difference is that current numbers are much larger, even adjusting for inflation. The key is whether the productivity profits of the generative AI will compensate for the spent money.
Between bambalins. The agreement explains the current situation in the AI ecosystem:
- OpenAi desperately needs computing capacity to maintain its competitive advantage over the 700 million weekly users of their products.
- But infrastructure costs are so high that it needs constant external financing.
Nvidia, on the other hand, seeks to ensure the future demand of its most advanced chips. The agreement guarantees mass orders while consolidating its dominant position against competitors such as AMD and Intel. “It is a closed cycle: Nvidia gives OpenAi money, and OpenAi uses it to buy Nvidia products,” Summary Summary Javier Pastor.
The threat. Anti -Ponopoopoly experts are already arched eyebrows. Andre Barlow, a lawyer specialized in competition, explained to Reuters that “the agreement could change the economic incentives of NVIDIA and OpenAI, potentially blocking the Nvidia chips monopoly with OpenAi software leadership.”
The structure creates extra barriers so that competitors such as AMD in OpenAi chips or rivals in AI models can climb their operations. They paint basts.
In perspective. The story is full of similar schemes that ended badly. Global Crossing, the telecommunications operator that broke in 2002it was funded precisely by the same suppliers that sold equipment. When it was discovered that the real demand was much lower than the projected, both Global Crossing and its financiers lost thousands.
The key question is whether the demand for AI services will be sufficient to justify this billionaire investment, or if we are faced with the recreation of the same speculative pattern with even more exorbitant figures. As Stacy Rasgon concludesBernstein analyst: “On the one hand, Openai helps meet very ambitious infrastructure objectives. On the other hand, it will further feed concerns about ‘circular’ financing.”
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