Well, that’s a complicated story. Nvidia took out $25Bn in loans to make the chips. Microsoft has enough cash to survive for 80 years without making a single dollar of revenue starting today. So the first batch of chips were paid for with 1st party cash reserves. But then the a.i. companies emerged and they actually didn’t have enough cash to buy the chips. So Nvidia invested its cash reserves in the a.i. companies, and the a.i. companies then used that investment money from Nvidia to buy chips from Nvidia. So in the second large tranch of purchases, Nvidia was paying Nvidia.
For data center construction, the a.i. companies can’t pay for data centers because they aren’t credit worthy enough for it. So data centers are predominantly being funded by the Magnificent 7 in one way or another. Some of the a.i. companies have partnered with a Mag7 sponsor to piggy-back on the Mag7 build outs and use their new data center space.
Mag7 data centers are falling into two categories: 1st party and 3rd party. Mag7 data centers built 1st party are being funded directly by the capex budgets of Mag7. They have strong limits on how many simultaneous capex projects they can do because this money hits their balance sheets and each project is huge. But 3rd party builds do not have those limits. 3rd party builds are limited by lending, which is limited by risk. Essentially what’s happening is Mag7 OpEx budgets are being committed to future leases on data centers that aren’t built yet, and then banks are lending money to builders against those leases. The leases are them sold into the securities market so that the banks can maintain liquidity and keep the pipeline flowing.
Which sounds a lot like the subprime mortgage crisis all over again. A whole bunch of financial institutions are sitting on massive securities that derive their value from the future revenues of leases for data centers that don’t exist yet, and the majority of data center projects are failing.
In the end, there is no direct precise answer to “who’s paying them to do it” but the accurate holistic answer is “the blob” or “the machine”. The corporate-finance-military-industrial-state elite bloc.
Well, that’s a complicated story. Nvidia took out $25Bn in loans to make the chips. Microsoft has enough cash to survive for 80 years without making a single dollar of revenue starting today. So the first batch of chips were paid for with 1st party cash reserves. But then the a.i. companies emerged and they actually didn’t have enough cash to buy the chips. So Nvidia invested its cash reserves in the a.i. companies, and the a.i. companies then used that investment money from Nvidia to buy chips from Nvidia. So in the second large tranch of purchases, Nvidia was paying Nvidia.
For data center construction, the a.i. companies can’t pay for data centers because they aren’t credit worthy enough for it. So data centers are predominantly being funded by the Magnificent 7 in one way or another. Some of the a.i. companies have partnered with a Mag7 sponsor to piggy-back on the Mag7 build outs and use their new data center space.
Mag7 data centers are falling into two categories: 1st party and 3rd party. Mag7 data centers built 1st party are being funded directly by the capex budgets of Mag7. They have strong limits on how many simultaneous capex projects they can do because this money hits their balance sheets and each project is huge. But 3rd party builds do not have those limits. 3rd party builds are limited by lending, which is limited by risk. Essentially what’s happening is Mag7 OpEx budgets are being committed to future leases on data centers that aren’t built yet, and then banks are lending money to builders against those leases. The leases are them sold into the securities market so that the banks can maintain liquidity and keep the pipeline flowing.
Which sounds a lot like the subprime mortgage crisis all over again. A whole bunch of financial institutions are sitting on massive securities that derive their value from the future revenues of leases for data centers that don’t exist yet, and the majority of data center projects are failing.
In the end, there is no direct precise answer to “who’s paying them to do it” but the accurate holistic answer is “the blob” or “the machine”. The corporate-finance-military-industrial-state elite bloc.