- Oracle defaulting on its debt commitments.
- Anti trust action into Skydance forcing a breakup.
- Larry forced to cover the difference by selling family silver.
- Lanai going back into the hands of the people of Hawaii.
Just for the laughs and for forcing me to bear with some of the worst applications of all time.
Oracle is the last company I'd setup shop with.
Lol, it's 2026: it'll just go to some other billionaire. Probably Marc Benioff. I heard he likes owning Hawaii.
The impact of AI hype failing at this point has become too big to fail in the eyes of "rugged" American capitalism.
2.) The bubble pop doesn't pose systemic risk to the US economy
3.) AI companies hardly employ any Americans (that's the entire point)
4.) There's already direct precedent for letting the tech bubble pop (dotcom)
5.) AI is politically toxic with voters
6.) The bubble has been widely known to the public for YEARS while AI companies consciously ignored the risks and warning signs
7.) No amount of bailouts will fix a business model that sells $100 bills for $1
8.) The bailout would cost $30T (two thirds of the current US debt)
9.) The US government is broke at these debt to GDP levels
10.) A bailout is wishful thinking from AI bagholders
AI hardware is advancing rapidly. If NVIDIA's next generations deliver radically more tokens per watt and per dollar, an Oracle facility designed, financed, and contracted around an older GPU generation can be overtaken before it is fully online or fully monetized.
That's a big risk.
And to finance this they are making deep cuts to the ERP business where Oracle does have proprietary IP.
> an Oracle facility designed, financed, and contracted around an older GPU
> generation can be overtaken before it is fully online or fully monetized.
Every user of Nvidia's gear has thought of this, and Nvidia provides a solution: Newer components are (usually) compatible with older racks, and Nvidia will buy back parts you replace with newer hardware.
For example, let's say you have an NV72 with Blackwell-ultra. Rubin comes out, and you decide you want to upgrade. There is a SKU of Rubin designed specifically to work in the racks shipped with Blackwell. Use it, and you only need to replace the compute board (not the power system, cooling, networking, etc.)
Nvidia will buy back the Blackwell boards you remove (and sell them to someone else, with a warrantee).
If you want to do an upgrade that increases power use, you may have to get a new rack. All of the parts are modular, and all parts can be sold back to Nvidia.
Nvidia does this because they have to. Without it, many customers would consider other vendors when upgrading, or delay purchases in case something better comes along later.
"Only" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, considering that this compute board makes up the majority of the cost. And if they start going with bigger designs, like they’re doing now (compute in memory, custom TPUs etc), then even this won't hold.
> If you want to do an upgrade that increases power use, you may have to get a new rack.
Blackwell to Rubin upgrade is exactly that case. 3x3U 110 kW units vs the 8×1U 33 kW shelves typical in GB300 NVL72, power whip rating rises to 100A from 60A, rack coolant flow doubles versus GB300, and both compute and NVSwitch trays are fanless, 190-230 kW per rack depending on power mode vs about 140 kW for GB300 NVL72 and NVLink switching is new too etc
And where is your source about buyback program? I found no Nvidia trade in or buyback program for data center hardware. Used gear is resold through third parties, ITAD vendors like Procurri and Bitpro buy and resell used GPUs from hyperscalers, and resellers like Alta Technologies sell refurbished units with warranties.
The closest real thing is a financing arrangement announced in August where Nvidia partnered with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, and others and in SOME CASES may provide residual value support for up to 25% of an opportunity, assessed project by project. So in practice, if a borrower defaults and the lender has to liquidate GPUs that can't fetch their booked value, Nvidia covers part of the shortfall. That backstops lenders. It is not a buyback for customers who upgrade.
The difference is that none of this Nvidia gear can run on normal 120V (or even 240V) circuits, so it'll end up going to the landfill or just being powered down in place.
[0]: https://www.sunbirddcim.com/blog/nvidia-h200-power-requireme...
https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-800-v-hvdc-architec...
But I have questions:
1. How often do GPUs fail? I've seen figures that this is as high as 9% annual failure rate for DC GPUs;
2. How easy is it to get replacement stock? At what cost?
3. If you trade in, what value do you get for your GPUs?
4. What is the availability like? How does NVidia decide who gets the next wave of GPUs? That's NVidia's big power here. It's a bit like how Boeing and Airbus decide on customer order and if you upset them, you may lose other orders. This happened to Qatar Airways over the A380 [1].
5. How long are the current form factors and interfaces going to last? How long before the power requirements get larger than what DCs are currently built for? Blackwell GPUs use a lot more power than, say, 2 or even 1 generation ago did.
GPUs are a huge cost factor, allegedly more than 50% of the cost of a data center [2]. If you take a bath on the trade in and are forced to do it because you can't compete with the current generation's performance-per-watt, that's not a good situation to be in.
[1]: https://www.arabnews.com/business/qatar-airways-in-mystery-a...
[2]: https://orennia.com/insights/what-it-actually-costs-to-build...
Ultimately, someone has to provide "commodities", and if you think your ship is the right vessel to do it betting hard on this is some kind of strategic direction.
Whether they are right, and to what extent debtors and the market will put up with cyclic and performance issues, etc.. I certainly won't hold the stock, but I wouldn't have earlier either.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49978367
I understand that trucking the natural gas into the generation plant is one workaround.
"For this whole layered scheme [of Project Jupiter] to work, the campus needs as much power as a major city — think Los Angeles. Hooking into the existing grid turned out to be a problem. The workaround: generate power on site with fuel cells running on natural gas.
”The gas is supposed to come through a new pipeline spur that still has to be built. Most of the route crosses federal land, but about half a mile runs across state land. And that’s exactly where everything got stuck: on March 31, 2026, the New Mexico State Land Office denied the right-of-way, and on July 16 it rejected the second application. The pipeline, originally due to go online in August 2026, has been pushed back to February 2027.
”On top of that, the air permit for the entire power system still hasn’t been issued: the state Environment Department’s decision isn’t expected before November 23.
”Meanwhile, local opposition keeps gaining ground — as does the nationwide movement against hyperscale data centers."
My feeling is there is some kind of upgrade packaging done here. Like if the chips advance by X factor it can be offered at a massive discount or something? Otherwise it seems so silly to buy so much hardware which is evolving so fast.
he was living good - enjoying massive profits from his various moats but nah he had to risk it for the paramount deal, then stargate.
It is going to be incredibly difficult to bill outrageous amounts for armies of consultant to implement or customise the product when agents can do the same for much less, or at-least a 5-10x reduction in headcount for similar complexity of changeset.
If anyone is in the industry, please feel free to chime in as to what you are seeing on the ground.
> It is going to be incredibly difficult to bill outrageous amounts for armies of consultant to implement or customise the product when agents can do the same for much less, or at-least a 5-10x reduction in headcount for similar complexity of changeset.
> If anyone is in the industry, please feel free to chime in as to what you are seeing on the ground.
I do not deal with ERPs, but my understanding is that one of their big selling points has to do with financial audit compliance. They're big complex, hulking things, but battle-tested an trusted. If you use one, your auditor can just check off the box, but if you use custom software, then the auditor has to audit that too (in order to make sure you get really complex things like computing tax correctly in each jurisdiction correctly).
Huh? Is Oracle's plan with this funding to provide compute services for the big AI specialist companies? I assumed it was a buildout for their own AI services, as you're right, the former wouldn't make sense. (At risk of making a trollish, low-effort comment, OpenAI/Anthropic are savvy compute users and would have to be insane to risk getting entangled with Oracle.)
I read the article and I couldn't tell from it which of these is the case.
> In July, OpenAI and Oracle entered an agreement to develop up to 4.5 gigawatts of additional Stargate capacity. This represents a partnership that exceeds $300 billion between the two companies over the next five years.
Oracle doesn't have any. And that's wise. Oracle makes good RDBMS servers. They suck at everything else.
If rampant despotism is the end-goal, Oracle has already aligned themselves with the despots.
(Opacle == One Poor A-hole Called Larry Ellison)
That'll include some big retirement/investment funds, but it's not big funds blindly buying without considering the risk.
It's down more than 60% since it peaked in September 2025.
And if that $10b figure is a fixed target, then if the share price continues to fall, the more shares they will need to issue, resulting in even more dilution.
A simple example:
Current equity of $100B, 100 shares outstanding. Each share is worth $1B, with 1% of voting power.
Then we issue $10B of equity via 10 shares.
Now we have equity of $110B, with 110 shares outstanding. Each share is still worth $1B, except each share now has 1/110 of voting power, instead of 1/100. Each share now only controls 0.91% of the company. Their ownership has been diluted.
edit: You can throw this comment thread URL into your favorite clanker (Claude, Gemini, whatever) and it will confirm exactly what I'm saying.
—
Stock buyback example:
There are 10 shares of ABC Corp, it has a market cap of $100. Each share is worth $10.
ABC corp buys back one share and destroys it, leaving 9 shares.
$100/9 shares=$11.11 per share.
—
Dilution example:
There are 10 shares of ABC Corp, it has a market cap of $100. Each share is worth $10.
ABC corp needs $10 so they sell one additional share which the board has authorized. There are now 11 shares.
$100/11 shares=$9.09 per share.
However, in markets, a buyback is a positive signal (with increased EPS also) that can increase the share price.
So the new shareholders pay "into the pie" and the pie gets bigger, and the effect is that the old shareholders have a slightly smaller share of a slightly larger pie which, if the new shares were sold exactly at the market price, theoretically should have the exact same value - and in practice, assuming the decision to raise capital and invest is useful, usually results in a larger value.
But I'm not sure what people think the stock market is for? It exists primarily so that companies can access capital markets namely by issuing their own shares.
Historically for companies that were growing rapidly or had large capital needs, private markets weren't large enough to handle that. Times have changed, but the whole point of going public is to be able to raise capital by issuing shares.
A long stretch of unemployment can be weathered by selling a bit from strong investments, and a crashing stock-market can be waited-out by staying firmly employed, but both simultaneously is what can force people to "sell low" just to pay regular expenses.
Phrased differently, I don’t see how these companies could grow their equity like Google or Amazon did way back when without having full AGI and changing the entire world. They would need to become worth more than the entire world’s current GDP added up.
There’s a big range on the spectrum where AI does well enough to mess up your life but not well enough to make you even moderately wealthy.
I have no opinion on whether they are.
I think (somewhat arbitrarily), to get to higher valuations, you are going to have to disrupt more than just the software business. Which is what most labs are trying with finance, biology, chemistry, law, etc. That might be enough for a few hundred billion in TAM more.
I think to get to a ~5T+ valuation, then we have to start thinking about AI meaningfully displaces classes of jobs, maybe in the single digit %'s. As in, _global_ SWE headcount starts going down, but revenues for software companies as a whole go up.
I think for ~10T+, you definitely need meaningful job displacement across most white collar sectors.
> the fundraising was already outlined at an investor day last week
> “This seems to be exactly what they previewed,” said Rob Oliver, senior research analyst at Baird. “So I’m not sure why the market is freaking about it.”
If we did anthropomorphize people like him, he'd be in a lot more trouble than he is. Instead we legally and socially treat him like a lawnmower.