this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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Probably like 70%. The actual bubble is data centers full of GPUs, AI is just the current excuse for them. Maybe they come up with some other use for them, AI investment stops because the ROI is better on the other thing, and this sucks for people investing in OpenAI or whatever, but doesn't crash the whole system.
How bad if it does? The numbers will dwarf the 2008 crash, but the effects on normal people will be similar - nobody's hiring, you can't get a loan, any savings you have won't go as far as they were supposed to, and if you graduate college during the crash you're permanently fucked. This one might last longer. The 2008 crash had the dubiously mitigating factor that home prices crashed and people who happened to be buying then made it out okay. This one won't have anything like that for normal people, just for any startups that need a cheap deal on renting GPUs.
They’ve been doing this for a while. Crypto mining at home, followed by all the shit coins and NFT bullshit, for whatever reason the creeps behind GPUs figure out ways to keep the gravy train rolling. like I said below, I think the biggest upshot of this will be massive consolidation by the tech monopolies.
Yeah, they sure have.
The root of all of this is that growth stocks are massively overvalued compared to dividend stocks right now. The big tech companies (all growth stocks) have all maxed out how much money they can actually make in their markets, so they need something to do with their excess profit. The normal thing to do would be to start paying out dividends and cutting costs, but then they'd be dividend stocks, and their stock prices would plummet. So instead they need to find ways to reinvest money in their own business. But they're mature businesses that don't actually need all this reinvestment, so they just buy ever more datacenters full of GPUs, because that's expensive and plausibly something that might be useful to them. But something has to actually use all of these GPUs so it doesn't look completely stupid, so we've had the last few tech bubbles.
But I think it's going to be hard to pivot again, since the hype machine for AI is that they're going to do AGI and build god. I don't know what promise their hype men can come up with that tops that.