Other hardware manufacturers also wastly more profitable - RAM, SSD, HDD and literally everyone in datacenter supply chain.

It's the parable about how in a gold rush you want to be the guy selling shovels.

Them and Broadcom

It's historically called: selling buckets and shovels during a gold rush.

The only way to get consistently rich in any bubble economy.

I assume you are saying it would look less ridiculous? By how much?

In what ways do common accounting standards and amortizing the costs (this is tricky for ai and the current batch of gpus I hear!) change the data presented here? Does it detract from the point? Completely contradict it?

You can turn your drive-by dismissal into something really informative if you want to.

The depreciation is also insane and thus to sustain operations and improve, the spend will keep going.

If OpenAI and Anthropic adopted GAAP nobody would be able to invest in them it would be so bad

Yeah. Meta on the other hand. Ouch.

Right? Their V4 model is too good for them to be spending less than 1% of what Anthropic is.

certainly will be interesting to find out..

Yeah, my first impression when I saw this was: if this is accurate, the situation is not nearly as bad as I thought.

I do wonder why Nvida is included, though. If you include the company that all of the frontier models are pouring money into, of course the net (expenditure - profits) of the collective is going to be closer to zero :-)

Unfortunately the green bars are not just EBITDA, they're before discounts.

Right, especially given that majority of this investment is into GPUs and data centers that are amortized over a longer period of time. This is actually very hopeful.

Given how the curves look like in terms of ramping of spend, these are very healthy numbers.

> Not listing other hardware companies is just dishinest. AI is not a crypto mining where resources are just burned.

AI is exactly like crypto mining in that Nvidia is the one who profited from both

The economy is currently kinda riding on them.

These companies are blowing through an incomparable amount of resources. If their bravado is misplaced, the economic impacts will be far more significant.

dot-com bubble? It's less about black or white, and more about how much of it. Nothing weird to me about caring given how it all also impacts peoples lives and much wilder all these numbers are becoming.

It's not weird if you consider the details and the many ways that the situations are very different. But also, people cared about that other kind of BS too, e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39438372 or https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2017/10/undercover-at-th...

It’s weird to me that profitability is so thoroughly dismissed by the software tech industry because of an assumption that the tech industry will always be “early stage” and “high growth.”

If we look at a “success story” like Uber and it is still net negative over its entire existence. This is a business that’s in a literal monopoly/duopoly status in most markets it operates in with vastly reduced regulatory burden compared to the industry disrupted. Literally the ideal scenario for printing money and yet it hasn’t made any.

This just means that Uber and companies like it are a financial instruments to transfer dollars away from one set of investors to another set of investors.

If Uber hasn’t yet made its investment back, I struggle to wonder how some of these AI ventures will ever make that money back when their expenditures make Uber look like a small little side project.

We are decades since Web 2.0 took off, almost 20 years since the iPhone launched, 50 years of Apple Computer. Software isn’t some new industry anymore. These spray and pray economies would have died off years ago if it wasn’t for the fact that software companies have uniquely low cost structures where they don’t need to build factories or build out big distribution networks to get their products to their customers.

What do you mean suddenly? People have been talking about it for as long as relatively early stage LLM companies have been noteworthy.

The AI Bubble – No One's Happy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48230753 - May 2026

Well seeing how they've all collectively spent over a trillion dollars and American citizens still don't have medicare for all, universal childcare, free school lunch, a publics job program, or universal education; it's quite easy to see why the American public has soundly rejected this technology where some are even trying to inflict violence to stop it.

These companies are spending more money than budgets of many countries enough to add 2+% to the US GDP so the amount of loss for if it comes all crashing down will be huge.