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keeda12/10/20251 replyview on HN

> Demand is inflated in a bubble.

Is it? The dot-com fiber bubble for instance was famous for laying far more fiber than would be needed for the next decade even as the immediate organic demand was tiny.

In this case however, each and every hyperscaler is bemoaning / low-key boasting that they have been capacity constrained for the past multiple quarters.

The other data point is the climbing rate of AI adoption as reported by non-AI affiliated sources, which also lines up with what AI companies report, like:

https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/nov/state-gen...

That article is a little crazy. Not only are 54% of Americans using AI, that is 10 percentage points over last year... and usage at work may even be boosting national-level metrics!

> In fact their math doesn't seem to consider failure at all, which is highly suspicious.

That's a good point! If I had to guess, that may be because Burry et al don't mention failure rates either, and seem to assume a ~2 year obsolescence based on releases of new generations of GPUs.

As such, everybody is responding to those claims. The article I linked was making the point that even 9-year old generations are still in high demand, which also explains the 5 years vs 9 years difference -- two entirely different generations and models, H100 vs M4000.

And while MTBF is not directly related to depreciation, it's Bray who brings up failure rates in a discussion about depreciation. This is one reason I think he's just riffing off what he's heard rather than speaking from deep industry knowledge.

I've been trying to find any discussion that mentions concrete failure rates without luck. Which makes sense, since they're probably heavily-NDA'd numbers.


Replies

evanelias12/10/2025

> Is it?

Yes, demand is absolutely inflated in a bubble. We're talking about GPUs, so look at hardware sales for the comparison, not utility infrastructure. Sun Microsystems' revenue during and after the dotcom bubble, for example. Or Cisco's, for a less extreme but still informative case.

> it's Bray who brings up failure rates in a discussion about depreciation

Yes, I understood his point to be that depreciation schedules for GPUs are overly optimistic (too long) while their MTBF is unusually low. Implying what is on the books as assets may be inflated compared to previous normal practices in tech.

In any case, at this point I agree with the other commenter who said you're just trying to confirm your existing opinion, so not really much sense in continuing this discussion.