well, at least it is computer hardware, which famously keeps its value over long periods of time

Ed Zitron called it at least a year ago. He recently released an estimate of how many there are:

As of September, likely about $234bn worth (of the $561.5bn of Nvidia GPUs purchased since 2023) are sitting in warehouses or unpowered data centers.

So basically just inflating prices to keep the AI bubble bubbling. Amazon sponsoring Nvidia which then sponsors Amazon in return.

Surely the mark of healthy business practices!

Many people may see this and assume its just them drinking their own koolaid essentially but there is a bit of a twisted logic to it. They're basically just buying so many of these to keep the foundries happy to make them. They do have this delusion that they'll need more of them, but its more that they want production to increase so they are creating demand. Which is actually WORSE for the economy, because once their bet fails not only are these GPUs worthless but the foundries have built out production capacity that is now worth way less.

'We bought 600 train engines and 8000 rail cars, because we will probably figure out how to build 800,000 miles of new rail lines, somewhere, at some point.'

'Also the train engines and rail cars we bought are guaranteed to be horrendously inefficent within 2 years.'

'Also also, the train engines are highly fuel intensive and no we are not planning to fund any new fuel production.'

'We are very smart.'

'Why yes, our future rail line traffic demand projections are based on the "thoughts and prayers" model, thanks for asking!'

Give them a break, it's not like they're a big cloud services company

Just remember these fuckers want to live forever, and then everything makes sense.

They expect AI to be able to grant them inmortality, either biologically OE digitally.

Their ego is so grand that maybe existing as a AI replica of themselves is enough.

If Amazon and the rest were around during the Tulip Boom and Bust, we would still be trading tulips for houses because they can manipulate this shit indefinitely.