alt Hacker News> Is that based just on the HN "it is lots of money so it can't possibly make sense" wisdom?
I mean the amount of money invested across just a handful of AI companies is currently staggering and their respective revenues are no where near where they need to be. That’s a valid reason to be skeptical. How many times have we seen speculative investment of this magnitude? It’s shifting entire municipal and state economies in the US.
OpenAI alone is currently projected to burn over $100 billion by what? 2028 or 2029? Forgot what I read the other day. Tens of billions a year. That is a hell of a gamble by investors.
The flip side is that these companies seem to be capacity constrained (although that is hard to confirm). If you assume the labs are capacity constrained, which seems plausible, then building more capacity could pay off by allowing labs to serve more customers and increase revenue per customer.
This means the bigger questions are whether you believe the labs are compute constrained, and whether you believe more capacity would allow them to drive actual revenue. I think there is a decent chance of this being true, and under this reality the investments make more sense. I can especially believe this as we see higher-cost products like Claude Code grow rapidly with much higher token usage per user.
This all hinges on demand materialising when capacity increases, and margins being good enough on that demand to get a good ROI. But that seems like an easier bet for investors to grapple with than trying to compare future investment in capacity with today's revenue, which doesn't capture the whole picture.