alt Hacker News> He seems to think that the moment Nvidia release new hardware, all existing hardware becomes worthless.
I am the OP and I totally agree with you on this one point. In fact the progress being made by open weights models strongly suggests that some of this hardware has much more of a life.
The overarching point he makes about incomplete data centres is that the current offering is running successfully on that very incomplete capacity, right?
What he is saying is that he cannot believe the demand exists to fill any of the unbuilt stuff, but much of it is still commitments that are going to have to be paid for, unless they can be backed out. He points to Nadella essentially confirming there will be overcapacity.
He also makes an interesting point that people tend to think "I can't get a GPU right now" means "there is intense, live demand for GPUs in data centres" when in fact the reason you can't get one is buy-and-hold. Including much of that new replacement hardware: it is being bought even the old stuff would (let us stipulate will) do the job.
I think he (or someone who interviewed him) recently said it reminded them less of the dot com boom and more of the Chinese real estate bubble.
Future demand is unknowable. He might be directionally correct but wrong in magnitude, or right about everything, or wrong about everything. Unfortunately people who call bubbles never make their claims falsifiable or do anything else to build confidence, like take short positions. Zitron attacks the very notion that he might put skin in the game like that as obviously crazy.
I don't know to what extent we can say the current offering is running successfully. Anthropic have had visible capacity constraints for 18 months now with lots of throttling and quota capping going on. Those are good signs that demand does exceed supply at the current price point.
Additionally, Mythos has not launched publicly and one reason seems to be that it's too slow/expensive to make widely available, i.e. is capacity constrained.
But supply/demand is always in equilibrium, in some sense. So you could argue that it's currently balanced, or would be if priced correctly. That tells you little about future demand though.