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seatac76 22 hours ago [-]
Things I hope for:
- 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.
thayne 16 hours ago [-]
Add giving up or losing the trademark on Javascript to that list.
10111001 22 hours ago [-]
> - Lanai going back into the hands of the people of Hawaii.
Lol, it's 2026: it'll just go to some other billionaire. Probably Marc Benioff. I heard he likes owning Hawaii.
ashkankiani 12 hours ago [-]
oh ok then I'll just give up on hoping things change, thanks for saving us all the time
xyst 21 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, what will really happen is that they will receive a massive bailout from Main Street. Just like in 2008 for the banks.
The impact of AI hype failing at this point has become too big to fail in the eyes of "rugged" American capitalism.
cowlevel 21 hours ago [-]
It's clear that American capitalism and AI are now fully intertwined. Either they both collapse or they both succeed. This bubble is actually too big for the government to bail out and if it tries it'll probably just bring the American dollar down with it, like tying helium balloons to the Titanic.
fhrjfjdjfn 19 hours ago [-]
1.) The Fed is tightening because of hot and worsening inflation
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
cowlevel 17 hours ago [-]
It's not about the employment though, it's the financial macroeconomics. A third or so of the US's stock market is AI companies. Let's say they all go to zero, it basically cuts a third off the US's paper wealth and a third off the US dollar's value (which is primarily based on the stocks you can buy with it). The government doesn't want that to happen so it'll try to prevent the stocks from going to zero. The cure may be worse than the disease but this government won't realize it is.
chasil 3 hours ago [-]
I bailed on the S&P when oil shock concern was first expressed earlier this year.
I will get back into a non-U.S. total market index fund (VXUS or equivalent) after the dust settles with Iran.
I will wait on buying the S&P, and perhaps QQQM, until after the Anthropic IPO at the very least.
fhrjfjdjfn 16 hours ago [-]
The Fed has no statutory duty to the stock market.
cowlevel 15 hours ago [-]
The Fed is subordinate to the executive, even if it thinks it isn't.
If the executive is bankrupt they might use the trillion dollar coin loophole or they might just actually take control of the Fed.
fhrjfjdjfn 15 hours ago [-]
That would be just about the fastest way you could spike US Treasury yields into a debt crisis.
ashkankiani 12 hours ago [-]
And let's not forget that the US is heavy into short term debt that needs to renew: "As of Q3 FY2026, approximately 33% of U.S. publicly held marketable debt is due to mature and require renewal (refinancing) within 12 months."
trvz 19 hours ago [-]
And yet, for anyone who believes we’re on the path to true AI these are all irrelevant.
adventured 16 hours ago [-]
> 9.) The US government is broke at these debt to GDP levels
Well that one is false. They print and debase any income or wealth held in USD.
So their print-against base is any and all assets held in USD globally.
The Japanese are also not broke, they've merely spent the past two decades destroying the Yen and chopping down the Japanese standard of living. Print, print, print.
fhrjfjdjfn 15 hours ago [-]
The interest payments on sovereign debt need to be coverable with tax revenue unless you want hyperinflation (real hyperinflation, not meme hyperinflation). The US can't afford interest payments to be any larger.
cowlevel 15 hours ago [-]
Real hyperinflation is a possibility.
Barrin92 12 hours ago [-]
>It's clear that American capitalism and AI are now fully intertwined.
in what world is that clear lol, American capitalism will do just fine, if the AI companies go down before they can offload all their crap on retail investors the lion's share of the losses will go to the private investors currently writing checks.
The broader banking system isn't exposed, the housing market isn't exposed, the average American would take a 10% hit of on their retirement account but that'd be it. It'd wipe out a fair amount of the tech sector but they're all sitting in California and don't win anyone elections so no point to bail them out
rsoto2 21 hours ago [-]
at the start of the pandemic when employees were confused and worried about their families larry emailed his entire company informing them that due to everything going on he was going to permanently move to his private island and "make it a better place with the locals" dude is scum and a colonizer at heart.
p4ul 21 hours ago [-]
Be careful, rsoto2, it sounds like you're at risk of anthropomorphizing the lawnmower. [1]
All the people who ever worked on Oracle iProcurement fired into a volcano?
paulpauper 21 hours ago [-]
Lanai was passed between private owners for well over a century. it was never in the hands of "the people"
paulryanrogers 20 hours ago [-]
Natives collectively possessed all of Hawaii long before the concept of private ownership arrived.
thrance 3 hours ago [-]
Ackshually... I believe the first Polynesians to reach and settle Hawaii already had a concept of property and land ownership.
lokar 19 hours ago [-]
Well over? It was taken by force about 130 years ago
platevoltage 18 hours ago [-]
A whole century? The word "never" is doing a lot of work here.
elorant 19 hours ago [-]
Oracle's core business is healthy as fuck. It can't default. It could get into a long period of low R&D since all profits would be directed to serve their debt and that could hurt their product line, but they'd definitely can't just vanish into thin air.
bluedevil2k 18 hours ago [-]
Oh they certainly could default. They make $70B a year in revenue and $17B in profit. Their current interest payments are $5.7B a year!! Their debt is only 1 grade above junk.
But the truest measure of their potential to default, their credit default swaps, are pricing in a 20-22% chance to default before 2031.
justin66 19 hours ago [-]
What is their core business today? I remember when it was the enterprise database server product, but I can't imagine that is true anymore.
giancarlostoro 18 hours ago [-]
They're basically trying to make themselves into the likes of Azure, GCP and AWS. Now you might think that there's no way Oracle will ever be that big, but half of their revenue for the 2026 fiscal year is from their cloud infrastructure, which, trust me, surprised even me.
Oracle is the last company I'd setup shop with.
happymellon 12 hours ago [-]
I think it is probably either:
1. Companies wanting to go cloud, and depend on something like RAC that Oracle refuses to licence to other scalers.
2. Companies beliving in "multi-cloud", and some corrupt exec deciding that Oracle should be one of the options.
I know that a few gigs ago I had to deal with them as part of the multi-cloud enterprise strategy for these reasons.
tempest_ 17 hours ago [-]
Is it actually from the cloud section or are they doing like IBM where the marching orders came down that cloud was the way and every mid level manager saw which way the wind was blowing and then worked real hard to get their calculator app moved into the cloud silo.
Shorel 17 hours ago [-]
I dislike Oracle as much as anyone, but Google is the last company I would use as a cloud provider.
Alive-in-2025 16 hours ago [-]
Google is worse, hmm, what are some of the reasons why? How could they be worse then endless software audits. I have heard of the endless pain of google killing something you depend on.
Shorel 16 hours ago [-]
Because they can ban your entire corporate account, as a paying customer, for one developer that's flagged in their system joining your org.
And there's no human in the loop you can talk with when that happens. Just one automated response after another.
The only appeal possible is to become viral and force their hand to check your case.
Honestly, I would avoid both.
Alive-in-2025 13 hours ago [-]
The painful banning that google does with automated takedowns and no humans to easily talk to is a real impediment. That feels like a perfectly legit complaint. That policy is so self destructive. I think all auto bans without human review should end, but instead we are just making this worse with more and more automated systems.
giancarlostoro 13 hours ago [-]
They are notoriously difficult to contact if your company is banned, or someone within your company is banned. That's it, poof, gone, everything you have.
imglorp 17 hours ago [-]
Both companies are awful to customers. But the Oracle cloud product is truly terrible.
plantain 17 hours ago [-]
I had significant free credits for their cloud product. It was not even useful at a 0 pricepoint. I had to escalate repeatedly until I was doing screenshares with very high level engineers, to show them that their VM's, the more core offering, literally would not start.
tempest_ 17 hours ago [-]
They did have those Ampere arm chips which we mildly interesting for a hot minute a few years ago but seem to have disappeared somewhere.
Shorel 16 hours ago [-]
I think we are in agreement here.
cowlevel 16 hours ago [-]
Government contracting. It doesn't matter what the government wants to do, if it involves computers then Oracle is trying to be the supplier.
willio58 16 hours ago [-]
Buddy works at a public university. Can confirm oracle has their greedy hands in all of the crevices of that place. Slows down the tech stuff so much, since they have to work on top of all this proprietary junk.
CamperBob2 19 hours ago [-]
Claude, build me a copy of Oracle RDBMS. Make no mistakes
tracerbulletx 17 hours ago [-]
Claude, sue anyone who isn't paying me until they are paying me.
happymellon 12 hours ago [-]
Here is a copy of an Oracle RDBMS.
> Gives you a licence washed MySQL
chorsestudios 17 hours ago [-]
ChatGPT, check Claude's work. Once verified, focus on identifying elegant solutions to the shockingly large list of expensive pain points that we encountered with Oracle RDBMS. Run benchmarks using production data. Work on improvements until all database benchmark metrics are equal or better. Make no mistakes
thevillagechief 16 hours ago [-]
This is depressing. Is this really what software engineering has come to? I should have been a doctor. At least until Optimus do surgery on these guy's brain. Unitree, verify Optimus's work
Alive-in-2025 16 hours ago [-]
I've been thinking AI writing the software would get us to huge messes of software stacks that kind of work and no one really understands how they work. Like a giant magic software tower than no one can touch or understand, just hope it keeps working.
disgruntledphd2 5 hours ago [-]
> software stacks that kind of work and no one really understands how they work
We've been heading that way for a long time before AI. AI is definitely making it worse in many cases, by lowering the bar to getting something that "works".
Like, you could write a web server in R. You'd need to bang your head against a wall for a while, which might make you think again, but with LLMs it's just a machine that is insanely goal oriented working very quickly.
flowerlad 23 hours ago [-]
Oracle does not have any proprietary IP that OpenAI depends on. That means Oracle is providing commodity services to OpenAI.
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.
balarjin 22 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.
dktp 22 hours ago [-]
I would be very very curious in some source of these Nvidia buybacks
lossolo 21 hours ago [-]
> you only need to replace the compute board
"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.
gessha 22 hours ago [-]
What does Nvidia do with the parts they buy back? Resell to others or grind to dust?
Danox 22 hours ago [-]
Forward them to their, partner Microsoft…
jsjdjccjdn 20 hours ago [-]
[dead]
jsiepkes 22 hours ago [-]
I doubt NVidia wants thriving second hand market, so I would guess grind to dust?
mschuster91 22 hours ago [-]
resell them? there is a decent market for people fine with less efficient, already used gear.
jmyeet 22 hours ago [-]
I'm not really sure they have thought this through. Or at least their solution has been to essentially insulate the company and even the physical building from the debt used to buy the GPUs. These SPVs typically lease the building and secure the debt to the GPUs themselves so if it all goes pear-shaped, it'll be the debtholders who are left holding the bag, priamrily.
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.
The real shame with all of this is that when (not if) the AI bubble pops, it's going to be like the 1990's, when there was a huge supply of unix workstations, etc.
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.
elevation 20 hours ago [-]
If I acquire some cheap H200s, I intend to build a rack mount power supply that I can feed from a dryer plug. 4x H200's need about 2.8KW, which you could pull from a standard 240VAC 20A dryer/oven breaker [0].
2.8KWs is just the GPUs. Add another 400 watt for CPUs and RAM and the rest of the hardware, and then leave at least a 30% headroom for PSU loss and spikes. Suddenly you're close to 4KW. And then of course you'd have to remove all that heat from the room.
irishcoffee 18 hours ago [-]
So... a 30A breaker instead of a 20A breaker? And a few hundred bucks creating a venting solution to the outside? I could set this up at my house right now, by myself, in a day, maybe 2.
tedd4u 16 hours ago [-]
Should be fine, just put in a 60A breaker, 6AWG line, etc. Just like you would for 48A EV charging.
elevation 17 hours ago [-]
The 20A breaker already had 30-40% headroom.
cowlevel 16 hours ago [-]
You're required to have at least 20% for continuous loads and your breaker may nuisance trip if you don't.
olyjohn 18 hours ago [-]
Yeah? My shop at home has two 4kw electric heaters in it. That's not even a big deal to wire up to your main panel.
cowlevel 21 hours ago [-]
What does it run on?
hedora 21 hours ago [-]
Not sure what they run on in 2026, but next year, 800V DC, 1MW per rack:
The graphics cards still take 12V. They're just bringing a higher voltage to the server PSU. That's a forgettable, easily replaceable commodity component.
bogomipz 14 hours ago [-]
There is no plug-and-play upgrade SKU that allows you to drop Rubin compute boards seamlessly into a Blackwell rack. A Blackwell NVL72 rack pulls around 100 kW to 140 kW. A Vera Rubin NVL72 rack is estimated to draw up to 190 kW to 230 kW per single rack. Rubin is also liquid-only cooling. Further it uses NVLink 6 which requires a different backplane.
Where is there evidence of buyback program for Blackwell boards?
kev009 22 hours ago [-]
I'm no fan of Oracle, but you could make the same claim about land developers, or datacenter operators, or REITs. Or a random conglomerate like Unileaver or GE or Siemens.
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.
flowerlad 19 hours ago [-]
Commodity products can't demand high profit margins. Supermarkets typically have 1% to 3% net profit margin. SaaS often has 70% to 85% profit margins. Data centers hover around 15%. You don't want to sacrifice a high profit margin business in order to gain share in a low profit margin one.
nonethewiser 17 hours ago [-]
>Supermarkets typically have 1% to 3% net profit margin. SaaS often has 70% to 85% profit margins
Different types of margin. 1-3% for groceries is net, 70-85% for software is gross.
chasil 20 hours ago [-]
This previous [flagged] post implies that a natural gas line blocked by regulatory action is holding an Oracle data center offline:
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."
cowlevel 16 hours ago [-]
It's really telling how they just assumed all the permits would be approved, putting in no effort to ensure that would actually be the case. Because until now they've always been rubber-stamped on anything they do.
matt3210 20 hours ago [-]
Rubin is supposed to be 10x ... I hope b300 prices crash and I can pick up a few
halamadrid 22 hours ago [-]
Sometimes I wonder if the people committing and spending this much money is really thinking about this or not?
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.
22 hours ago [-]
dzonga 20 hours ago [-]
larry's big ego couldn't take it - being left out of the hypetrain.
he was living good - enjoying massive profits from his various moats but nah he had to risk it for the paramount deal, then stargate.
serf 16 hours ago [-]
if living good was the goal post for Larry he'd have quit decades ago.
arisAlexis 23 hours ago [-]
ERPs are done. Data center permits, space, contracts to buy scarse GPUs and energy are the moats today. The chips can provide more tokers per watt but the world needs exponentially more tokens each day
AgharaShyam 22 hours ago [-]
Curious to know why you think ERPs are done. I actually do somewhat agree with you in that their best days are behind them.
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.
10111001 21 hours ago [-]
> Curious to know why you think ERPs are done. I actually do somewhat agree with you in that their best days are behind them.
> 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).
cgio 20 hours ago [-]
They are so custom anyway that auditors need to audit them. Auditor familiarity is a point though. Audit is almost never about numbers, that’s the easy part, it’s about controls. Numbers will almost always come out right, the challenge is how they come in.
bigyabai 23 hours ago [-]
On strictly business terms, you're absolutely correct. Considering that OpenAI and Oracle both eat from Trump's hand though, I think that Larry Ellison has a few tricks up his sleeve to remain a "necessary" contractor. This is probably a shorter-term investment to pad out the coffers 5-10 years from now.
If rampant despotism is the end-goal, Oracle has already aligned themselves with the despots.
SilasX 22 hours ago [-]
>Oracle does not have any proprietary IP that OpenAI depends on. That means Oracle is providing commodity services to OpenAI.
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.
hedora 21 hours ago [-]
When this all unwinds, I suspect that deal will have Trump's fingerprints all over it. There will also be sort of graft that screws over taxpayers, and somehow the money will never be returned.
flowerlad 22 hours ago [-]
> their own AI services
Oracle doesn't have any. And that's wise. Oracle makes good RDBMS servers. They suck at everything else.
nradov 22 hours ago [-]
Their JVM doesn't suck.
flowerlad 19 hours ago [-]
It was invented by Sun Microsystems, acquired by Oracle and now developed by engineers from Red Hat, SAP, Amazon, IBM, Google, and others.
ksec 10 hours ago [-]
I mean it is not like oracle sit there and other companies do all the work. They do employ a lot of people contributing to the JVM ecosystem whether you hate them or not. So credit where credits due.
HDThoreaun 20 hours ago [-]
Is that why java is such a popular language these days?
happymellon 12 hours ago [-]
It was never unpopular.
You had some tryhards pulling some insane class name from the bowels of a library [1] and using that as an example that Java will always have a problem with naming and is therefore doomed. Or an alternative language claiming that they will eat Javas lunch, forgetting that it is used in a lot of Enterprise and its going nowhere [2].
I have had a few gig that have needed me to work in Python, JavaScript or Typescript, but there was always a pairing with Java.
[1] See Aspectj - HasThisTypePatternTriedToSneakInSomeGenericOrParameterizedTypePatternMatchingStuffAnywhereVisitor.java
Yes, it's extremely popular. No matter how you count it's at least in the top 10 programming languages for new code being written. And there are several other niche languages that also target the JVM.
solyin 19 hours ago [-]
It is. If your media diet consists of HN and reddit you'd think people actually use Rust, but judging by who's hiring for what according to Indeed, Java is 3rd after Python and JavaScript, and Rust doesn't even rank.
Qiu_Zhanxuan 22 hours ago [-]
A company that is purely in Denial, even doubling down at the risk of toppling the whole financial system should be placed under the financial equivalent of arrest and its leadership actually arrested. They're obviously playing with fire and it's alarming that no one's in the administration is batting an eye.
nonethewiser 17 hours ago [-]
What's your thesis on how their $125B in debt would bring down the whole financial sysetm?
thrance 3 hours ago [-]
All AI players are in bed with each other, they have commitments and obligations to each other. One of them failing (namely Oracle) could bring them all down domino-style. And us with them, since the market is ride or die with these companies.
lotsofpulp 22 hours ago [-]
Oracle is small potatoes, it’s not toppling anything. If anything, Oracle’s demise would boost productivity.
wavefunction 22 hours ago [-]
Oracle not able to provide its usual "services" would disrupt many institutions which unfortunately rely on their technology and assistance operating the often expensive and complex Oracle integrations they've set up, for better or worse. I really despise Oracle and the Ellisons and they don't need a bailout but I'd hate to see what could come from many significant collapses of technology for social institutions.
triceratops 21 hours ago [-]
Oracle the company filing for Chapter 11 protection doesn't mean Oracle the software stops running on all the machines it's installed on.
tedd4u 16 hours ago [-]
Technology and services for Oracle databases and enterprise apps would be part of bankruptcy restructuring. Being of value, it would not just shut down and disappear. As a business unit, it might be purchased (for example by IBM).
mindslight 16 hours ago [-]
It might. Have you ever seen what happens to a lawnmower when it overheats?
justinhj 22 hours ago [-]
If Oracle suffered a massive financial collapse wouldn't all those aspects of its business that are needed and paid for "just" get sold off and be managed as a new entity? I quote just because it would be an enormous amount of paperwork and organizational restructuring, but people with enterprise scale money tend to get to keep the services they pay for.
coredog64 22 hours ago [-]
This came up in the last discussion: The TL;DR is that shareholders go to zero, bond holders take a haircut and then own "new Oracle" (Opacle?) that can generally sustain itself with revenues from agressive JDK audits, RDBMS licenses, and ERP/PeopleSoft.
(Opacle == One Poor A-hole Called Larry Ellison)
cowlevel 16 hours ago [-]
He wouldn't be involved any more. It would be Aracle: another rich asshole conquered Larry Ellison
lotsofpulp 21 hours ago [-]
The technology would not collapse, only the equity owners' purchasing power would collapse. Ellison owns 40%, so the rest of society only loses 60% * $360B = $260B, which is not much in the grand scheme of things.
lkbm 20 hours ago [-]
And "the rest of society" are those buying BBB/BBB- bonds. This is a risk taken in exchange for higher interest rates.
That'll include some big retirement/investment funds, but it's not big funds blindly buying without considering the risk.
asdfman123 21 hours ago [-]
Just think of it as a final service shutoff. Clients have had 30 years to migrate off of Oracle. /s
dcrazy 23 hours ago [-]
Half of that would be in stocks, resulting in 2.5% dilution for shareholders at the current market cap. But the stock is down 8%.
xlayn 22 hours ago [-]
First homeopatic share.
pier25 21 hours ago [-]
> But the stock is down 8%
It's down more than 60% since it peaked in September 2025.
loeg 23 hours ago [-]
It's not dilutive -- current shareholders get $10B (or 97% of $10B, whatever). Market reaction is some combination of profitability concern / bankruptcy risk because Oracle is super leveraged and taking on even more debt. Maybe the AI hyperscalars will slow down spending in 2028.
donkers 23 hours ago [-]
It’s literally dilutive. Current shareholders now only own 97.5% of the equity instead of the 100% they owned previously.
dcrazy 23 hours ago [-]
Yes, even if the company raises $10b, the ownership stake and voting power of a share is reduced by 2.5%.
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.
loeg 21 hours ago [-]
They own a smaller portion of outstanding shares, but the shares they own are worth more. Their value doesn't decrease.
donkers 21 hours ago [-]
They're not worth more. The number of shares is increased by the amount that was issued. So that larger amount of equity is split among more shares.
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.
loeg 17 hours ago [-]
Again, their economic value is the same as it was before.
donkers 15 hours ago [-]
Yes, that’s exactly what my example tells you. And share price remains the same. You keep claiming it goes up or somehow is “worth more” which is absolutely not what happens. Current shareholders don’t get that $10B as you claim (please look at the math in my simple example). That’s new equity split among all shareholders, new and old, not just current ones, thus keeping the price per share the same. And ownership share of the company goes down per share of stock. That’s the literal definition of dilution.
dcrazy 17 hours ago [-]
You seem to be actively resisting the understanding that share dilution is not just about the company’s balance sheet.
donkers 15 hours ago [-]
It is bizarre, like they’re not actually reading what people are saying.
cowlevel 16 hours ago [-]
No it isn't because the share price went down
quickthrowman 20 hours ago [-]
Issuing new shares is dilutive.
—
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.
donkers 20 hours ago [-]
Mechanically, from a corporate finance perspective, the price per share doesn't change. Equity decreases or increases by the amount of the buyback or issuance. So in your example, a buyback of 1 share means equity becomes $90, and each share is still worth $10. Likewise for dilution, equity goes up to $110, share still remains at $10. The dilution refers to the ownership of the company, not the stock price.
However, in markets, a buyback is a positive signal (with increased EPS also) that can increase the share price.
cowlevel 16 hours ago [-]
Except ABC corp has $90 in example A and $110 in example B
nextaccountic 21 hours ago [-]
Wait, how is this legal? How are current shareholders made whole?
donkers 21 hours ago [-]
The board can authorize issuing new shares up to the limit defined by the corporate charter (giving them the ability to raise capital as in this case). Issuing more shares beyond that or beyond the limits defined by the exchange rules go up to a shareholder vote. Shareholders can also sue to block things if there's shady stuff going on. Current shareholders aren't "made whole" there are just more shares and they now own less of the company.
PeterisP 19 hours ago [-]
The newly issued shares get sold by the company and the company gets that money for their investment/operations/whatever purposes.
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.
loeg 21 hours ago [-]
Their shares are worth more as a result. Oracle's corporate charter has some provision for the number of shares they're allowed to issue and existing shareholders bought their shares knowing that. Increasing the authorized share limit requires shareholder vote.
dcrazy 17 hours ago [-]
This is one of the ways that owning equity in a company is not the same as owning a portion of the company.
Oracle begging couldn’t happen to a nicer company, the only thing that can be said is bubble, bubble bubble…
jawiggins 23 hours ago [-]
Previously, I thought investing in AI companies would be a good hedge against AI taking my job, but I hadn't considered the possibility that they fund the build out by issuing shares. Is there no reprieve?
qeternity 22 hours ago [-]
The shares you own (usually) give you voting rights. Whether that makes any difference is another story.
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.
program_whiz 23 hours ago [-]
maybe not. There could be mass unemployment and all the big dogs could also lose from the buildout while smaller players (non-public) take over. It could be a lycos / yahoo / google situation where there was no "winner" to invest in during the initial dotcom crash, and there was large-scale disruption all the same.
Terr_ 22 hours ago [-]
I'd like to note that "the sector which employs you" should be considered when talking about diversifying. (In general, not only when worried about the Robot Takeover.)
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.
22 hours ago [-]
arisAlexis 23 hours ago [-]
The dotcom crash has nothing to do with the AI build out
everforward 20 hours ago [-]
I’m not actually convinced they’re a good hedge because the market cap seems to presuppose a lot of success.
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.
staticman2 22 hours ago [-]
Theoretically hedging would only work if the A.I. firms are not already priced for taking your job, right?
I have no opinion on whether they are.
boshalfoshal 21 hours ago [-]
I think they are actually underpriced relative to "taking away" jobs. I personally believe ant at 1-2T is pretty reasonable if you consider claude to effectively be the "best devtool of all time," aka it literally writes all software for you.
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.
staticman2 21 hours ago [-]
Claude is in (potentially) a price war and research and development arms race with OpenAI and Google, and potentially other labs, so I don't think it's necessarily a given to price it as the company with the "best devtool of all time".
BigTTYGothGF 23 hours ago [-]
Not for people like us.
arisAlexis 23 hours ago [-]
It actually is but very few people realized that yet. We are still at "it doesn't work it's a fluke" denial phase
baggachipz 23 hours ago [-]
I would assume it's to hire more lawyers.
silicon3383 17 hours ago [-]
Surely Lawrence Ellison can afford $20B? Hasn't he spent that much lobbying politicians, buying media companies, acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign entity? Or he could liquidate his superyacht collection?
cowlevel 16 hours ago [-]
From what I understand, he's on thin financial ice now because he spent so much money doing all that stuff.
tedd4u 16 hours ago [-]
Skydance (combined Paramount + WB) has > $16B debt on the books.
thedougd 23 hours ago [-]
Broadcom is waiting to buy up the pieces.
amelius 21 hours ago [-]
Are they going to build a lawyer AI? They have the data for it.
vb-8448 22 hours ago [-]
At this point it's a race between "how much money are left in the market" and "profitability". And both are hard to predict.
ksec 9 hours ago [-]
I have often wonder, if Oracle is interested in selling ownership of mySQL, dtrace, Solaris and ZFS.
shrubble 19 hours ago [-]
Friends who worked at a telecom were told directly by Oracle salespeople that they were all-in on AI and that the software for telecoms that Oracle owns was being put into maintenance or sunset mode.
proc0 23 hours ago [-]
Skynet finally? (Terminator movie used Oracle building as Skynet HQ, forgot which one)
genxy 23 hours ago [-]
We are b-roll in the skynet/oracle cinematic universe.
Tostino 23 hours ago [-]
I hope nothing but the worst for Oracle as a corporation...though nothing against the technical talent there.
blobbers 19 hours ago [-]
build out and bail out are starting to seem very similar in these contexts.
ai_critic 23 hours ago [-]
Misread the title at first as "to finance AI bailout".
silverFork 23 hours ago [-]
LOL.. It is that under the cover.
Havoc 19 hours ago [-]
Isn't oracle already quite top heavy on debt?
kats 13 hours ago [-]
Hoping the worst for them.
nchmy 22 hours ago [-]
hopefully their demise brings JavaScript back to the commons!
Of all the companies in the world this is one of the ones I root against the hardest. Hoping for the worst outcome on this investment.
petre 23 hours ago [-]
Yeah I hope they get bought by Broadcom, like VMWare and the board sends Larry straight to retirement.
netsharc 22 hours ago [-]
What a punishment, free up your days to spend your billions...
mistrial9 23 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
lenerdenator 22 hours ago [-]
As an aside: that's just the problem: we don't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison, or his ilk.
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.
silverFork 23 hours ago [-]
LOL..
glouwbug 20 hours ago [-]
Buildout or Bailout?
6thbit 20 hours ago [-]
> 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.”
- 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.
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
I will get back into a non-U.S. total market index fund (VXUS or equivalent) after the dust settles with Iran.
I will wait on buying the S&P, and perhaps QQQM, until after the Anthropic IPO at the very least.
If the executive is bankrupt they might use the trillion dollar coin loophole or they might just actually take control of the Fed.
Well that one is false. They print and debase any income or wealth held in USD.
So their print-against base is any and all assets held in USD globally.
The Japanese are also not broke, they've merely spent the past two decades destroying the Yen and chopping down the Japanese standard of living. Print, print, print.
in what world is that clear lol, American capitalism will do just fine, if the AI companies go down before they can offload all their crap on retail investors the lion's share of the losses will go to the private investors currently writing checks.
The broader banking system isn't exposed, the housing market isn't exposed, the average American would take a 10% hit of on their retirement account but that'd be it. It'd wipe out a fair amount of the tech sector but they're all sitting in California and don't win anyone elections so no point to bail them out
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2308s
But the truest measure of their potential to default, their credit default swaps, are pricing in a 20-22% chance to default before 2031.
Oracle is the last company I'd setup shop with.
1. Companies wanting to go cloud, and depend on something like RAC that Oracle refuses to licence to other scalers.
2. Companies beliving in "multi-cloud", and some corrupt exec deciding that Oracle should be one of the options.
I know that a few gigs ago I had to deal with them as part of the multi-cloud enterprise strategy for these reasons.
And there's no human in the loop you can talk with when that happens. Just one automated response after another.
The only appeal possible is to become viral and force their hand to check your case.
Honestly, I would avoid both.
> Gives you a licence washed MySQL
We've been heading that way for a long time before AI. AI is definitely making it worse in many cases, by lowering the bar to getting something that "works".
Like, you could write a web server in R. You'd need to bang your head against a wall for a while, which might make you think again, but with LLMs it's just a machine that is insanely goal oriented working very quickly.
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.
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...
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...
Where is there evidence of buyback program for Blackwell boards?
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.
Different types of margin. 1-3% for groceries is net, 70-85% for software is gross.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49978367
https://archive.ph/jDXdm
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).
If rampant despotism is the end-goal, Oracle has already aligned themselves with the despots.
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.
You had some tryhards pulling some insane class name from the bowels of a library [1] and using that as an example that Java will always have a problem with naming and is therefore doomed. Or an alternative language claiming that they will eat Javas lunch, forgetting that it is used in a lot of Enterprise and its going nowhere [2].
I have had a few gig that have needed me to work in Python, JavaScript or Typescript, but there was always a pairing with Java.
[1] See Aspectj - HasThisTypePatternTriedToSneakInSomeGenericOrParameterizedTypePatternMatchingStuffAnywhereVisitor.java
[2] https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2024/07/is-java-still-releva...
(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.
https://javascript.tm
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.