Re:Nvidia Allegedly Engineered Scarcity by Funding AI Startu...
by dofm on Saturday November 14, 2026 @11:19AM
(#50498224)
FWIW we absolutely know for sure that both AWS and Microsoft have racks upon racks of GPUs that are unused, if the cards are installed at all.
(AWS could have $20B of unused GPUs at this point — it's widely reported that there was at least $5B in August, with up to $3B more arriving each month)
We know that Satya Nadella has been open about how one of his big problems (as a CEO) is that he has bought GPUs he cannot plug in anywhere.
So 50%? Who knows. But if AWS and Microsoft can't plug them all in, why assume anyone else can?
The clear indication is that cold/dark GPUs delivered to major customers, GPUs that Nvidia has sold but still has on its shelves (buy and hold), and GPUs that Nvidia has sold, leased back from customers and may or may not have plugged into their own cloud, together represent a large enough proportion of sales to have pushed up the prices of GPUs and caused scarcity that is somewhat artificial.
If you take the scarcity of GPUs to be a solid proxy for assessing compute demand — or even for the sales of GPUs to be a solid proxy — then you are making a dangerous bet, IMO.
(AWS could have $20B of unused GPUs at this point — it's widely reported that there was at least $5B in August, with up to $3B more arriving each month)
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-nvidia-ai-gpu-data-ce...
We know that Satya Nadella has been open about how one of his big problems (as a CEO) is that he has bought GPUs he cannot plug in anywhere.
So 50%? Who knows. But if AWS and Microsoft can't plug them all in, why assume anyone else can?
The clear indication is that cold/dark GPUs delivered to major customers, GPUs that Nvidia has sold but still has on its shelves (buy and hold), and GPUs that Nvidia has sold, leased back from customers and may or may not have plugged into their own cloud, together represent a large enough proportion of sales to have pushed up the prices of GPUs and caused scarcity that is somewhat artificial.
If you take the scarcity of GPUs to be a solid proxy for assessing compute demand — or even for the sales of GPUs to be a solid proxy — then you are making a dangerous bet, IMO.