In short
Odd Lots Podcast Episode Summary
Episode Title
Why Paul Kedrosky Says AI Is Like Every Bubble All Rolled Into One
Hosts
Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway
Guest
Paul Kedrosky
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Overview In this episode, Joe and Tracy dive deep into the current state of the AI boom, exploring whether we are experiencing a bubble akin to previous financial bubbles. Their guest, Paul Kedrosky, a venture capitalist and expert in the tech sector, argues that the convergence of various elements from previous bubbles makes the current AI investment landscape particularly precarious.
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Key Themes
The AI Boom and Financial Concerns
- Current Anxiety: Recent comments from industry leaders, such as OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, have heightened concerns about the sustainability of investments in AI.
- Massive Investment: Companies like Anthropic committing $50 billion to data center development highlight the tremendous capital flowing into AI infrastructure.
Bubble Characteristics
- Historical Comparison: Paul argues that the AI boom combines elements of various historical bubbles, including:
- Real Estate: The speculative nature similar to past housing bubbles.
- Technology: Echoes of the tech bubble of the late 1990s.
- Exotic Financing Structures: Use of Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) and private credit to fund projects.
- Government Backstops: Discussions surrounding potential government support for AI initiatives, reminiscent of past bailouts.
Capital Expenditure (CapEx) Dynamics
- Schrödinger's Cat Analogy: CapEx in AI could either be a significant strength or a perilous weakness depending on future revenue generation.
- Investor Risks: Heavy CapEx spending might not yield expected returns, leading to broader economic implications.
The Role of Private Credit
- Shift from Traditional Financing: Increasing reliance on private credit as traditional banks retreat from high-risk lending.
- Complex Financing Structures: Companies employ SPVs to manage and mitigate financial exposure, complicating the overall risk landscape.
Unit Economics and Profitability Challenges
- Negative Unit Economics: Many AI models currently operate at a loss, seeking to recoup through volume rather than profitability.
- Revenue Models: Companies are exploring various revenue models, though the fragility of such models poses risks to investment sustainability.
Global Competitive Landscape
- U.S. vs. China Approach: Both nations are engaged in a race for AI supremacy but are employing vastly different strategies:
- The U.S. focuses on massive spending and proprietary technology.
- China emphasizes rapid adoption and development of open-source models.
Future Implications
- Economic Stimulus or Burden?: While AI spending behaves like a private-sector stimulus, it may create significant risks if future revenues do not meet expectations.
- Impact on Broader Economy: Unwinding this investment could lead to economic destabilization, impacting broader financial systems tied to AI growth.
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Conclusion The episode presents a sobering view of the AI boom, emphasizing the precarious balance between innovation and investment risk. As AI technologies continue to evolve, the potential for both significant economic benefit and turmoil remains high.
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Key Quotes
- “This is the first bubble that has all of that... we have a meta bubble.” — Paul Kedrosky
- “We have to win this competition, we have to do what it takes.” — On the existential stakes of AI investment.
Further Reading and Resources
- Center for Public Enterprise Report: "Bubble or Nothing"
- Links to Relevant Articles:
- [AI Startup Cursor Raises Funds at $29.3 Billion Valuation](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-13/ai-startup-cursor-raises-funds-at-29-3-billion-value-wsj-says?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=odd_lots&utm_content=article)
- [Point72’s Drossos Sees AI Boom Driving Gains in Asian Currencies](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-14/usd-krw-point72-s-drossos-sees-dollar-easing-fall-as-ai-to-aid-won-yuan?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=odd_lots&utm_content=article)
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Join the Conversation
- Discord Channel: [Odd Lots Discord](https://discord.gg/oddlots)
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Note This summary encapsulates the primary discussions and themes from the podcast episode, highlighting the intricate dynamics of the current AI investment landscape. For a more detailed exploration of the conversation, listening to the full episode is encouraged.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00You're being sold an AI future where you're obsolete or irrelevant. That vision is wrong. At Palantir, they're building AI that helps workers and unlocks their full potential. American workers are our nation's greatest strength. AI shouldn't eliminate them. It should elevate them. Palantir is here to tell their stories. From factories to hospitals, AI is freeing people from drudgery, letting them do what humans do best. Create. Solve. Build. Palantir, making Americans irreplaceable.
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1:54Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal. And I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, covering the AI boom is actually reminding me a little bit of the tariff boom in April, simply because every day there are new headlines. Just today, we're recording this November 12th. Anthropic commits$50 billion to build AI data centers in the U.S. So the advanced model companies are vertically integrating more to build their own data centers. Every day, some new development. Yeah, it's becoming pretty hard to keep up. So I think we're probably just going to talk in terms of billions and trillions.
2:29We're just going to say lots and lots of money is going into the space. But the way I've been thinking about it is, OK, at this point, everyone agrees that the AI build out is super expensive. And all these companies are spending massive amounts of CapEx to do this. And I'm starting to think that AI CapEx is kind of like the Schrodinger's cat of markets in the sense that it could either be a massive strength for these companies because the CapEx is so expensive and it takes so much money to build out. And so anyone who manages to do it kind of builds a moat around their business. Or it could be a massive weakness, right?
3:09If you're spending all this money and then that doesn't end up generating the revenues that you actually need to justify it. And going back to the Schrodinger's analogy, it seems like we just don't know what's going to come out of the box, right? Like it's simultaneously a strength and a weakness. And until we build out AGI or whatever, like we're just not going to know. Totally right. There's so much. at stake here. And obviously, we know the numbers are absolutely enormous. They're staggering, and we can talk about them too. The financing structures are also very interesting. You know, it's one thing if you just have Meta or Alphabet, and they make a ton of money already, and they're spending money on data centers, whatever.
3:49That's one thing. It's another thing when you start seeing these SPVs where the hyperscaler puts in this amount of money, and then the private credit puts in this equity, and then they borrow a bunch. And then there's all these questions about the payback. And we think of tech as from years and years as basically being this equity story. And when it becomes a credit story. Yeah. And when, you know, people are talking about quoting Oracle CDS. I always forget these companies even have CDS because I'm so unused to thinking of big tech companies as credits. So when I see people starting to tweet Oracle CDS charts or core weave CDS charts, it's like, OK, we are in a different level of capital intensity.
4:27Right. And some of those swaps have been going up lately. I'm going to say one more thing. Thinking back to the 2008 financial crisis, I remember the economist at Raymond James, I think it was Jeff South, who went on to become a very big name. Yeah, we should have him on the podcast. But he made the point that historically, when you had real estate crashes, property crashes, it was usually because of a problem in the economy. But then what happened in the run-up to 2007, 2008 is the housing market crash became the proximate cause of the troubles in the economy. And if you think about how much money is being spent on AI right now, again, billions, trillions possibly, of dollars, it's very easy to see how AI could morph into a problem for the wider economy.
5:16For the real economy, totally. Just on this note, and then we'll get into our conversation. The Center for Public Enterprise is out with a great report today called Bubble or Nothing by Advait Arun, pointing out one of the things that makes data centers interesting is how they sit at this intersection of essentially industrial spending and real estate. It's an interesting asset class for its own right. So much to talk about. We could never do it justice in one episode, but that means we got to do more. Anyway, I'm very excited for today's episode. We really do have the perfect guest, someone who's been writing about this for a long time, someone who's just been writing about the Internet and all things for longer than any of us, someone who's been blogging and investing for far longer than either of us or anything like that, way more knowledgeable about how these businesses work than most, very focused on the data center build-out.
6:02We're going to be speaking with Paul Kodrosky. He is a fellow at the MIT Institute for the Digital Economy, also a partner at SK Ventures, and longtime internet blogger, writer, newsletter, yapper, et cetera. Someone we've never had on the podcast before. So, Paul, thank you so much for joining us. Hey, guys. Thanks. Good to be here other than the blogging part. No, you're a true pioneer in that, and it's impressive that you still write with the output that you do. At some point in the last year, I feel like you really got laser-focused, or maybe in the last two years, really got laser focused on the data center story is, this is where the action is.
6:42Yeah, I did. And in part, just because I caught myself by surprise with it. It was weird. I was looking at first half GDP data, actually first quarter GDP data earlier in the year. And, you know, this has become now a commonplace that people know this, but I hadn't realized what a large fraction of GDP growth in the first quarter data centers were. It was on the order of 50%, much larger. If you included all sort of externalities, all the other things that data center spending in turn kind of accelerates. And then obviously the same thing was true in the second quarter. And it was, I got back to thinking about my dog and I was, my analogy is that.
7:13As one does. As one does. I got to be like, my dog barks when the mailman comes to the house and keeps barking. And then the mailman goes away. And I'm convinced he thinks he makes the mailman go away, right? He has this really screwed up causality. And it's like, dude, if you don't bark, he goes away anyway. This is part of the job. They just go away. And I think about macro policy in the same way that if you don't understand the drivers of GDP growth, you're likely to think that whatever it is you would most like to be causing GDP growth is doing that. So in the case of the U.S. in the first half of the year, you know, it was this puzzle was, well, maybe it's tariffs.
7:47Maybe tariffs are actually contributing to it. Maybe consumers are much more resilient than we expected. And as it turns out, a huge factor, probably the largest factor, was this sort of unintentional private sector stimulus program, otherwise known as data centers. And for me, that all started, so that started this puzzle of understanding this sort of discommensurate size, the consequences of that size, and the acceleration's consequences in terms of where the money's coming from and all sorts of other things. But just to reframe in terms of something you guys were already talking about, and this I think is super important in understanding why this particular episode is likely to turn out to be historically really important.
8:26When you say episode, you're referring to this podcast episode. You're not referring to the broader episode of AI Data Center? No, entirely just the podcast. Okay. Who cares about data centers when it's the 10-year anniversary of OddLodge? So the reason why it's going to be historically important is because for the first time, we combine all the major ingredients of every historical bubble into a single bubble. We have a meta bubble, no pun intended for meta. We have real estate. You guys just talked about this, right? Some of the largest bubbles in U.S. history had some relationship to real estate.
8:58We have a great technology story. Almost all the large modern bubbles have something to do with technology. We have loose credit. Most of the major bubbles in some sense have a loose credit aspect. And then one of the other exacerbating pieces that's some of the largest bubbles, thinking about even the financial crisis, is some kind of notional government backstop. You know, think about the role in terms of broadening home ownership in the context of the real estate bubble and the role that Fannie and Freddie played and loosening credit standards and all of those things. This is the first bubble that has all of that.
9:27It's like we said, you know what would be great? Let's create a bubble that takes everything that ever worked and put it all in one. And this is what we've done. So it's got a speculative real estate component. It's probably one of the strongest technology stories we ever have. Back to rural electrification in terms of a technology story, we have loose credit. You guys talked about what's happening with respect to not just the role of private credit, but how private credit has largely supplanted commercial banks with respect to being lenders here. So we have all of these pieces that have all come together at once.
9:56And I think in terms of framing what's going on right now, it's really important to understand that it brings together all of these components in ways we've never seen before, which is one of the reasons why the notion that we can land this thing on the runway gently is nonsense. I love that framing. The meta bubble is perfect. Also, I had an epiphany earlier. I already told Joe, so you can attest to this, but I realized private credit kind of supplanted shadow banking as the term, right? Like after 2008, we called it shadow banking. And then at some point it flipped to, I guess, the coupler private credit.
10:30Shadow banking always sounded sinister. Right. In a way that private credit doesn't to the same degree. Well, someone figured that out and they're like, well, now it's private credit. I like to think of it as a kind of financial witness protection program. It was like, oh, you're those guys. I understand now who you are. Yeah, it's kind of like that. And it's now like one point, whatever it is,$1.7 trillion is the size of, which is larger than, you know, many components of the orthodox lending market combined in terms of the private credit industry itself. So that's a huge new piece of this that sometimes escapes notice, how big it is and why it emerged.
11:01So all of those pieces. Yeah, it's stunning, the growth that we've seen. Let me ask a very basic question before we go further. But one thing I've been wondering is, Joe mentioned that Anthropic headline that we heard before. We've seen Meta raising financing for data center builds, all that stuff. Why do these massively profitable and cash-rich companies have to raise financing at all? Well, they don't, but there's these irritating shareholders out there who get all pissy whenever you start diluting earnings per share too much and diverting it towards a single source. Now, that's not the case with private companies, obviously, but by the same token, OpenAI doesn't have the luxury of having cash flows via which they can do any of the things we're describing.
11:43So Anthropic, OpenAI, and everyone else, they have no option other than to do exactly what we're describing. It's a different story with respect to what percentage of Google's free cash flow or Amazon free cash flow that they want to continue to divert towards data centers. So in terms of the privates, this is the only option that they have. The public's obviously increasing the hyperscalers. Increasingly, we got up to the point where around$500 billion, sort of 50 % of their free cash flow was going directly towards spending on data centers. And that's obviously a point at which we have other things we have to do with free cash flow, and including having some of it be earnings per share.
12:18And so increasingly, it's become the option. And you see what Met is doing recently with respect to its SPVs. We bring in other participants, create new financing vehicles, and then we play this entertaining game of it's not really our debt. It's in an SPV. I don't have to roll it back onto my own balance sheet and then bring in new lenders, new private credit firms and others. And so that's the reason, obviously. It's partly because of the scale. It's partly because the privates will have no other option. And it's probably we've kind of tapped out the public companies in terms of the fraction of free cash flow that they feel as if they can spend with impunity on these projects.
12:50So explain to us, for those who don't know, you know, again, SPV, one of these terms that we really haven't heard in a while. And there's nothing inherently bad about an SPV, except that you only hear about them typically after there's something, you know, some sort of crazy. Right. Which is weird, obviously. But how would you say in the broad strokes, how would you characterize what these financing vehicles are? So mechanically, it's just a way of making sure that I don't have to roll data onto my balance sheet. But legally, it's a structure into which I and my partners contribute capital that in exchange for which they retain legal title to the project that we've created, which allows us to all contribute capital to this, but not have to put it back on my balance sheet and therefore not to have that debt rated, which is really the key.
13:33Now, if you look at the actual intrinsic, say, for example, the recent meta project that they did in conjunction with Blue Owl, it's wild in Byzantine. It looks like something you might have seen. And what was that in Harry Potter, the forest with all the spider webs? It looks a little like that, right? where everything's connected to everything. And all I know is there's something in here is going to get me. So there's incredible complexity, but at the core, it's a mechanism via which I can raise more capital and keep it off my balance sheet by creating a legal entity that controls the actual data center.
13:58And I don't therefore have to put it back, roll it all back onto my balance sheet and have it rated. Now there's weird intricacies, obviously. So for example, what happens if at some period in the future, this thing isn't performing the way we expect? Who owns it at that point? Is there a payment exchange? Does it become Metas? Does it become Blue Owls? Does it become someone else? And these things will turn out to matter. Right now, no one cares. If you go through some of the documents on these things, it's not entirely clear what the recourse payment will be if and when it ever has to revert back to another owner and it's not going to be held on to by the SPV.
14:32And I think this will turn out to be really important four or five years down the road. But right now, nobody cares.
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17:23And you kind of get this asset liability mismatch. Yeah. So I'll start with the first one first. So this gets into something Michael Burry was tweeting about the other day, which was about four years ago, tech companies changed the appreciation schedule for the assets inside of data centers. They extended them somewhat. Now, that wasn't an error. The reality is that data centers used for the purposes like at AWS, where you've got a big S3 bucket and I'm storing data inside of it. Those things, generally speaking, the assets are long lived. I'm not running them flat out. These are not streetcar racers that I'm running around inside of a data center.
18:01These are relatively inexpensive chips that I'm using for really mundane purposes, like storing large amounts, terabytes, exabytes of data inside of S3 buckets. So it's not unreasonable to say their lifespan is fairly long. They're not being taxed that heavily. So pushing out the depreciation schedule makes a lot of sense. But that was coincident with the emergence of GPU-driven data centers using products like chips from NVIDIA. And those have much shorter lifespans. So depending on the usage, so there's two different reasons why the lifespan and therefore the depreciation schedule of a GPU inside of a data center is very different.
18:35So the reason most people think about it is, oh, well, technology changes really quickly and I want to have the latest and greatest and therefore I'm going to have to upgrade all the time. That's important, but it's probably about equal, if not maybe slightly less important than the nature of how the chip is used inside the data center. so when you run using like the latest say an nvidia chip for training a model those things are being run flat out 24 hours a day seven days a week which is why they're liquid cooled they're inside of these giant centers where one of your primary problems is keeping them all cool it's like saying i bought a used car and i don't care what it was used for well if it turns out it was used by someone who was doing like lamont's 24 hours of endurance with it that's very different even if the mileage is the same as someone who only drove it to church on Sundays, right?
19:21These are very different consequences with respect to what's called the thermal degradation of the chip. The chip's been run hot and flat out, so it probably, its useful lifespan might be on the order of two years, maybe even 18 months. So there's a huge difference in terms of how the chip was used, leaving aside whether or not there's a new generation of what's come along. So it takes us back to these depreciation schedules. So these depreciation schedules change just as the nature of how the lifespan of the chips change dramatically. Because I can use something for storing things in S3 buckets for a long time.
19:55Six to eight years isn't unreasonable. But if I'm doing the Le Mans endurance equivalent with a GPU, it might be 18 months. That's a huge difference in terms of the likely lifespan of a product that I'm depreciating over a very different period. And so that's a huge part of the problem here with respect to understanding the intrinsics in terms of how data centers can and can't make money, how you have to think about the likely CapEx requirements because of this much shorter lifespan of the underlying technology. And then talk about the tenancy rollover risk, I guess we might call it. Yeah, it's really interesting.
20:31So one way to think about data centers is those giant apartment buildings, right? They're essentially gigantic commercial pieces of commercial real estate with a bunch of tenants. Sometimes there's a lot of tenants. Sometimes there's only one. Sometimes Google bought the whole apartment building and just moved in. Or there's a giant office building. They just moved in. It's all theirs, right? So think about it in those sorts of terms. And the reason why, as a sponsor of a data center, I might take a different view on how many tenants I want is, again, you think about it in terms of what can I get Google to pay versus what can I get someone who's a much flightier tenant to pay?
21:03Well, I can get the flightier tenants, more of them, and diversified as all leasing inside the data center paying higher lease rates for GPUs over the period of tenancy than I can get a Google to pay. Why? Because Google's got great credit. They don't have to pay very much and they know they don't. So if you look at the commercial real estate data, the cap rate, the blended cap rate for the largest data centers that are tenanted by hyperscalers is horrible. It's like 4.8, 5.3%. It's like, why don't you just buy a treasury? What are the world you're doing? So what happens then is people start blending in more different kinds of tenancy.
21:37To Tracy's point as an effort to try and improve the yield, the cap rate on the underlying instrument, which is the data center. So all of this should start to sound familiar because it's this idea of if I blend together all of these different tendencies, I can increase the yield of the securitized instrument. But that also changes the risk profile of what comes out the other end, which takes us to things like the increasing usage of these things in asset-backed securities, which are these tranche securities that have all the different pieces. We have different layers associated with it. And that's a reflection of, well, there's different tenants inside these data centers and people want different exposures to risks.
22:13So I may only want to buy the senior tranche. You may want to buy the mezzanine and Tracy may want to buy the equity tranche. Can I just say, I know we already said this, but Paul is truly, truly the perfect guest. I remember reading his coverage of subprime and securitization in like 2008. And so having someone who's able to synthesize that experience with what's going on now is just fantastic. I kind of can't believe we're doing this again. I know. I mean, look, I mean, again, there's nothing inherently wrong with SPVs. There's nothing inherently wrong with tranching, right? Like a lot of these things are very intuitive, et cetera.
22:49But it is still a little weird how central this is and how it's the same old. There's nothing. I mean, on some financial level, it feels very familiar. No, there's nothing new under the sun. But I think that point's really important. It's not that tranches are evil. It's not that securitization is evil or that asset-backed security or project finance is evil. No, all of these things are terrific pieces of the arsenal whenever you're actually raising money for projects. The issues start to arise at the scale, which is what you guys have already alluded to. But the secondary piece, which again will sound painfully familiar to the financial crisis, is there's a flywheel that gets created at the back end of this.
23:28So once you start securitizing the yield producing assets in the form of these tranche securities, the people who are purchasing those things don't give a rat's ass what's going on inside this AI. I joke all the time that a lot of these people can't spell AI. They don't care what's going on inside the data center, right? It could be, you know, the World Hide and Go Seek Championships going on in there. I don't care as long as it generates yield and I can securitize it. Well, it's very much analogous to what's happened in prior periods like this. Where, again, you get this secondary flywheel effect of let's just create more of these things because our customers want more and they're really easy to securitize.
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24:07And look, it's backed up by Meta and Google or whoever else. Well, so this actually brings an important point. I mentioned this great report out from the Center for Public Enterprise. One of the things that they pointed out is in this market environment where everyone is just, you know, there's this sort of AI pixie dust that but also just the reality of your revenues are surging, the market probably loves you. like talk to us about the unit economics here like is the incentive for all the players essentially to just grow the top line as much as possible even if these aren't whether we're talking about inference on a per token basis even if these aren't particularly profitable how are you thinking about the unit economics of some of these businesses and how that could eventually perhaps sort of um you know come home to roost so to speak yeah so the term of art obviously is these things have negative unit economics, which is a fancy way of saying that we lose money on every sale and try to make it up on volume, right?
25:05I mean, that's the problem here. But that's okay. I mean, we've had lots of things. Amazon in its early days had negative unit economics. You can get past that. And as an aside, I'll say right here, all of the things I'm saying isn't to say that AI is some kind of furry Tamagotchi thing that's just a fad. AI is an incredibly important technology. What we're talking about is how it's funded and the consequences of doing that in terms of what's going to happen with respect to the businesses and the return on those businesses, right? So the unit economics are dire for a bunch of reasons, mostly having to do with the more tokens you have to produce, the costs rise more or less linearly with the demand on the system, as opposed to an orthodox software business where the more people who use my service, the more people across which I can spread my relatively fixed costs.
25:52That's not the way that, for the most part, current generation large language models work. costs rise linearly or sublinearly with the number of users, which makes for really crappy unit economics. And that's a big part of the problem. So from there, you get to the question of, okay, so what does it have to look like in terms of making it look profitable? There's lots of ways to back into this. You can do bottoms up models that would suggest that like if every iPhone user on earth paid 50 bucks, that'd work. We could have around a$400 billion,$500 billion annual stream of revenue flowing. And well, that's not going to happen, but it's worth pointing out like that would do it but it gives you a sense of the kind of scale of what at a consumer level for example it might have to look like people come at it from the other end one of my favorite ways that people come out is to say well we could create a viable model here if you think this was in the jpm call last week i don't know if you guys saw the summary of it but it was huge fun for the whole family listening in um so one of the ways they backed into it was a top-down model where they said well the global tam for human labor i love this trillion dollars i love the global TAM.
26:57I said that was right up there with saying, like, if I reduce humans to their chemical components, here's what I can get for you. Well, this was Steve Eisman's line, which was like, beware of anyone that mentions TAM. Right, right, right. No, exactly. And so then they play the next step is, of course, to say, well, imagine we can get 10 percent of that, right, which is obviously one of the oldest cliches. It's like saying, you know, I'm going to get 5 percent of the Chinese market. No one ever gets 5 percent of the Chinese market. This doesn't happen. So the same thing won't happen with global labor.
27:26But if you were to do that, you do the math on that, that call those kinds of numbers get you to a weighted average cost of capital basis to a reasonable return on current and planned expenditures with respect to AI data centers. If you assume we're heading to about a three or four trillion dollar number, which is kind of the I think it's around the number that most people put out there, which I think is a completely wrong number. But nevertheless, that's the kind of number in which you'd have to do to get there. So you can get there from a bottoms up model by making some really unreasonable assumptions about the total numbers of subscribers and what they pay.
27:56You can get there from a top down model. You can also get there by thinking about it purely in terms of industrial users. Think about purely API users, let's pretend retail users of AI don't exist and say, Anthropics projecting$70 billion in revenue in 2028, something like 35 % of their current revenues, most of their revenues today are from their API. 35 % of that is from software developers. that split between two large users, Copilot and Cursor. And so, you know, we can model that out. Everybody has to become a software developer and we can make the math work. The problem is it's got huge fragility, right, and customer concentration risk.
28:34So a Cursor disappears as a user of Anthropix API and you just blew out 15 % of your revenues because they're gone and they've done something else. And as it turns out, Cursor two weeks ago announced that they were trading their own internal model that you could use for software development. and you wouldn't have to call the Anthropic API. So you can think about all these different ways to get there, but they all have a lot of built-in fragility with respect to either, so we all become software developers and we all subscribe to Cursor. Just going back to the used car analogy that you mentioned before, when we're thinking about all this financing of the AI CapEx spend, is it useful to think of GPUs essentially as the collateral?
29:14The problem, yes. Or what would you call the collateral in this case? So what ends up happening, the collateral in this case is the GP. There's no question it is the GP. The issue is this disconnect, this temporal mismatch that you alluded to earlier with respect to the duration of the underlying debt and the assets that are producing the income that allows me to pay for the debt, right? So we've got this probably unprecedented temporal mismatch with 30-year loans and two-year depreciation on the underlying collateral, which is essentially the GPUs that are the income-producing assets. And so that creates this constant refinancing risk because I'm going to continually have to turn over the base.
29:50And we've seen this many, many times. Right now, it's easy to turn it over. But in two years, it may not be possible. There's a wave of refinancings coming in 2028 in many of the more speculative data centers. Will they be able to turn over their debt and refinance all the GPUs? Today, they could. Today is in 2028. So that's the inherent problem is this structural temporal mismatch between the income producing assets and the duration of the loans. And it gets worse if you think about it in more holistic terms. Think about it in terms of one of the other gating factors here that's driving all of this is the scarcity of energy supply.
30:22It's really difficult. You can hook them up to the – well, it's actually kind of turned into a bit of a joke. I can hook you up to the grid, but I can't give you power. I don't know if you saw the recent episode with the Oregon Public Utilities Commission. Amazon had three data centers that they connected to the grid. And it was kind of like the Oregon PUC said, oh, you want power too. Oh, well, we can't help you with that. We can't help you with that. So now there's a complaint in the Oregon PUC from ADS, Amazon's the digital services group that runs AWS, complaining that we now have data centers, but we have no power.
30:51It sounds a little bit like a winter storm hazard or something, but it's a structural problem with respect to the inability. We can connect people, but we can't provide them with power. So the next stage is, and this takes us back to the collateral problem and the temporal mismatch, is that people are doing behind the meter power. They're building natural gas. Or if you're Fermi, you're saying wild things about nuclear power. And you're saying, OK, I'm coming with my own power. You don't need to connect me to the grid because I'm going to power this myself. That creates two or three different issues.
31:21But among the more important is think about how long lived an asset, a natural gas plant is. This is not something that's got a five-year lifespan and we just cheerily wave goodbye. This is going to be running probably 25 to 30 years. And the only thing, your ability to forecast, we know the cost of the natural gas plant, but in terms of the cost of the center and its ability to generate enough income to pay off the loan associated with the natural gas plant. God help you if you think you can sort that out, because what you've really got is a huge likelihood of a stranded asset out there, natural gas plants that are no longer useful for powering these things that they were built for.
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34:34Join over 500 happy families who've discovered the magic of Guardian. Visit GuardianBikes.com to shop now. That's GuardianBikes.com. The good news is that Daniel Juergen said this on the show. You know, the back orders for natural gas turbines, like you probably if you order one today, you would probably get it in 2030. So the good news, I suppose, is that at least you don't have to have the turbines sitting there for years. Like, I don't know. I don't know if that's good news at all. But there are you may never get it. You may never get the gas plant built anyway. Someone will be stuck with the bill.
35:08It kind of raises this goes back to Tracy's question earlier. This raises a really interesting thing. So like, like, honestly, what the F are all these people doing? who are announcing these giant funding transactions. I think of it like people all showing up at the OK Corral at once. And it's like, dude over there has one gun. I got two. Yeah. That guy's got, oh, two. That's not a knife. This is a knife. But it's this deterrence program that's going on. Don't even imagine spending 50 because I'm spending 100. There's no point in you doing any of this. So it's this game theoretic. Well, this also worries me because you hear so many people framing this as like an existential competition, right?
35:47And once you start calling something existential, the limit on spend, well, it becomes unlimited, right? It's about survival, so you'll spend anything. That's why the conversation has turned in recent weeks to the one entity that actually, at least in theory, can print as much money as possible. Right, that's the Sarah Friars accidental foot and mouth thing earlier in the week. But that's right, but that's again, it goes back to my original point about what makes this bubble unusual. individual it's the this element that not only is there a kind of bag stop but there's actually a notion of wrapping it in the flag we have to win this competition we have to do what it takes this is existential it's us versus china and it's not just the u.s doing this i was talking to some canadian policymakers just earlier this morning exact same thing going on there we have to build out a domestic in the same thing in the uk same thing in germany and so there's this idea around the world, that sovereign AI is something that's incredibly important.
36:43So this government backstop isn't just mythic, it's global. It's this idea that we all have to win. We all have to win, which obviously can't happen, but that the government's playing a role in it that can create this kind of limitless course of capital. You know, so one of the things that's going on, and maybe it's part of the same, this sort of maximalist strategy mentioned, Anthropic wants to get into data centers. So everyone's sort of looking at how they can expand vertically. Can I own the data centers. I think, you know, Sam Altman has talked about owning chips or owning a semiconductor fab at some point.
37:16Like maybe that'll be part of the story. Who knows? There's one thing that I don't, I'm sort of curious. I'd love to have your take on. There was at the end of September, Meta announced a deal to buy Compute from CoreWeave, one of these NeoClouds. I don't totally get that because Meta has its own data centers, et cetera. Do you have some intuitive sense about what an established hyperscaler needs a neocloud for in this arrangement? What core we can supply that Meta can't build on its own or buy on its own? Nothing. So that's the answer. So here's what's going on. This is what's going on, is that there's this form of hoarding going on.
37:56So what's happening is, is people saying, you have capacity, I can lock that up, I'll lock that up. And because I can't lock it up yet by building a data center quickly enough, I'll lock it up in the marketplace. So once you start thinking of compute as a hoardable commodity, and what people are doing is trying to hoard it, control it before someone else can do it, because until they bring on their own excess capacity, that's really what's going on in a lot of these transactions. This is a way of making sure that I may not need this, but you sure can't have it. And so there's an element of compute hoarding going on across the map because of this backlog in building data centers that may or may not ever get built.
38:34So that's the answer. The answer isn't that they care at all about whether or not they're going to run giant workloads on any particular neocloud provider. It's the idea of hoarding capacity and making sure that no one else can have it, like trying to have the Hunt brothers and getting a corner on the silver market. You know, I want to go back to China because it is true that the U.S. and China seem locked in this existential race for AI supremacy, but they seem to be taking very different approaches to it. And in the U.S., it's all about spending as much money as you can, developing these, you know, state of the art, mostly closed source models.
39:08Whereas in China, it seems to be much more about rapid adoption and creating open source models that just get out into the market much faster and much more cheaply. And so I'm curious, like, which of those approaches do you think is going to win here? Yeah, so that's a really good question. So I think it's going to be something closer to the Chinese approach, but not for the reasons they expect. So the reason is because I'll reframe what the Chinese are doing slightly. So I'll say that instead of it just being a sort of an example of open source, I don't think that's the right way to think about it is they're using this kind of distillation approach increasingly, where there's kind of a, you think about it like, okay, I'm a sales manager.
39:51I don't want to train all my salespeople. I'm going to train this dude, and they're going to train all the sales, but that's distillation, right? You train the trainer. I train somebody who trains something else, and the something else in this case are these smaller models. So that approach of kind of training the trainer really speeds up the process of creating new models because I distill them. I train them out of other models that are really compute intensive like Anthropics or OpenAIs or whomever else is right. So the notion is, so is there a huge efficiency gains to be had in training? And the Chinese are showing the huge efficiency gains to be had.
40:25And one way to think about it is that the transformer models that underlie large language models that are so computationally intensive went from the lab to the market faster than any product in technology history. So they're absolutely bloated and full of crap, right? So these things are wildly inefficient. There's all kinds of other ways to do the same sorts of things, one of which is distillation. So what you're really seeing is a kind of an accident of history that we came down, the US came down this path that led directly to the original transformer paper in 2017. And the Chinese have said, yeah, we're not going to be able to do that for a bunch of different reasons, but we don't have to do that because I can take this approach of distillation, which lets us get, you know, if you look at Kimmy, this sort of relatively recent open source model, these things are actually really effective in benchmark very well.
41:11And it's not surprising because they've been trained by really good trainers, which is to say some of the other models that are out there. But it's, these are about efficiency gains, which should then ask the next question is, whoa, wait a minute. If there's all these efficiency gains ahead from training and training is 70 % of the workload on data centers, hang on a second, And aren't we completely misforecasting the likely future, the arc of demand for compute? And the answer is yes. And this is rather than looking at it as an example of why China is doing something better for worse. Another way of looking at it is saying just just refuted the approach that we're taking to training altogether because it shows how bloated and inefficient the approach we're taking is.
41:49And yet we're projecting on that basis what future data center needs are. Part of the question, it seems to me, and this is where it gets a little bit philosophical, is what do these AI companies think they're building? Because one theory is like, well, maybe they're building business tools, right? Maybe they're building business tools of various sorts. And if they're building business tools of various sorts, that implies the possibility that eventually they get good enough. This does the job, right? This makes it easier for this website. You can use an agent to book your travel and the technology works and we don't have to keep building it because we got to the point where it works.
42:26And then there is this other question of like, well, maybe they want to build something called AGI or ASI that's so sci-fi, et cetera, in which case you could never get enough or simply having built the thing that allows you to book your travel or book a dinner reservation or translate a text or whatever, that's not nearly enough. You hear different things, but what do you think the builders at the cutting edge of these labs are going for? Is it really the sort of sci-fi building God cliche, or do they want to build profitable business tools? So it's the first thing until you challenge them, and then it's the second.
43:02So what happens is if you have the conversation internally, they'll say, yeah, no, no, no, we're building this really effective productivity-enhancing tools that will be used across a host of businesses. And these all sounds really good. But then when you walk through some of the math in terms of justifying the ROI on the spend, all of a sudden, then it turns into what I call faith based argumentation about AGI. And they say it's like the greatest call option ever. Like, what would you pay for a call option that could get you anything? And it's like, well, wait a minute. This isn't a way of justifying any particular expenditure.
43:33This is just faith based argumentation. implementation. We were saying, you know, with the Uber call option for anything, you should be willing to pay anything for it. And obviously that kind of justification doesn't get you anywhere. So in-house, they'll arm wave a lot about these different models that will emerge. Who knows? I had someone at NVIDIA tell me the other day that we really are just waiting for the Uber of AI to come along and show us the future. And I'm like, okay. But it's not an answer, right? Because in theory, if you're building a business productivity tool, then eventually you could solve your unit economics problem, right?
44:07If you're just trying to build a really great business opportunity, then it's simply, you know what, we don't have to build anymore. It works. And then the cash flow just starts pouring in and the cost per token goes down. You can. And there's a bunch of that already happening. It's really interesting. But what's increasingly happening is the problems they're solving are really mundane. So it's things like I'm trying to onboard a bunch of new suppliers. Right now, the people have weird zip codes and they sometimes don't match up. I have a dude in the back who fixes that. I'd rather have someone who could do it faster so they could onboard a lot more suppliers.
44:36Oh, it turns out these small language models are really good at that, these micro models like IBM's, Granite, and whatever else. But those things require a fraction of the training, are very cheap, are not going to justify anywhere near the economics needed to pay for the current spend. And yet those things are almost like very likely the future because it'll be profligate token use from micro models often hosted internally to do really mundane background tasks. Not very glamorous, onboarding new suppliers, matching records. Yeah. Great stuff. Just not really very exciting. But large language models are amazing at it.
45:12And small language models are amazing at it and almost free. And writing songs. Right, Joe? And writing songs. They can do that. I'm actually, I'm still annoyed that AI is like getting into art and music writing and all the fun stuff versus the stuff that I don't want to do, like folding laundry to your classic example. Or matching customer records. So going back to the beginning of this conversation, when we were just talking about the scale of AI investment and its impact on the U.S. economy, I'm pretty sure you are one of the ones who's described AI CapEx as like a private sector stimulus program for the U.S.
45:47economy. What are the actual consequences, either positive or negative, of having this massive private sector spend in the economy versus something, I guess, more typical, which would be a government stimulus or maybe growth driven by consumer spending or something like that? Yeah. So to an orthodox economist, the old line is like, it really doesn't matter what we pay people to do as long as we pay them. Right. It's the idea of I should be I should be you should be willing to pay people to dig holes in the ground and people over there to fill the holes back in again. It really doesn't matter as long as the money is out there and in circulation, right?
46:21It's all just stimulus, right? So to that way of thinking, it doesn't matter because the money is all finding its way back into the economy. But I think that's obviously hugely misleading because in this context, these are investments created with an expectation of a return. If they can't, then that flows backwards into all the entities that are built on that basis, whether it's private credit firms and their returns. The S &P 500, what is it, like 35 % now is AR-related, MAG-7, MAG-10, whatever. 40%, 50 % now the last two years return. So these are massive negative wealth effect when you unwind it, not just in terms of the direct spending, but in terms of the wealth effect with respect to what people's holdings are.
46:59So this is not as simple as saying this has just been a wonderful stimulus program. We're paying people to dig holes and filling them back in again. This is a wasting asset on something that's likely to be produced in quantities that we can never earn an economic return from, in part because of wildly flawed assumptions and projections about the future of demand for those units. And so that's the deep structural problem. And then you can get into this whole question of like, well, if it's just private equity guys get hurt, who cares? Screw those guys, right? And it's not, of course, because as we just talked about, it's in equity funds.
47:31It's firefighters and teachers money. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's in REITs now. Look at the larger holdings in REITs now, increasingly our data centers. And it's even in sort of sneaky backdoor ways, like we're seeing increases. I don't know if you guys are familiar with these new interval funds that are appearing there. It's all over now. Paul Kudrowski, I have a million more questions we could ask you, but much like the race towards AGI itself, that would imply that we'll ever actually get to the end of this conversation. So how about we wrap here and then just plan on, you know, revisiting the six months, maybe three years.
48:01We just keep revisiting down the line where we are in the cycle. As long as we haven't been turned into paperclips, I'm good. Yeah. That's the nightmare. Clippy. I feel like that was, no one talks about the old school paperclip maximizer stuff. Everyone's on to more esoteric fears. I know. People have moved on. Yeah. We need to worry. Did anyone, wait, did anyone ever try to securitize Clippy? They didn't, right? I don't think so. No. No, they never did. Thanks, Paul. Okay. Thanks guys.
48:39Paul's so good. That was a lot of fun. He's so good. Here's my highest form of praise for an Odd Lots guest. I am going to go back and read that transcript from beginning to end. That is a very good practice to do. Wait, you're not going to listen to it? You're only going to read it? No, I'm going to read it. Yeah, I can't listen to it. I just listened to it. I need to read it. I can't listen to our episodes. No, I just, you know, I think there's a lot more to do on all this topic. But the financing in particular and some of these arrangements, it's just incredible how the speed with which I guess I would say the financing has gotten interesting.
49:16Do you know what I'm saying? I think like a data center project 10 years ago, Microsoft AWS thing, just seemed like a fairly straightforward, it's probably more complicated than I appreciate at the time, but basically straightforward. We make this money and part of it is going to go to building more data centers to, you know, serve, you know, Amazon Prime streaming or whatever it is or some client thing or whatever. And then the degree of complexity with these SPVs and rollover risk and depreciation schedules and tranching of who it's gotten very interesting, very fast. Life finds a way. Life finds a way.
49:51Yeah. That was my terrible, terrible impression. I think that's absolutely right. One thing I would say is the fact that a lot of these big supposedly cash rich companies are doing this through SPVs that effectively preserve their balance sheet and their cash flow so they can do something else with it. I mean, a lot of companies use SPVs, sure. But I do think it says something about the scale. Yes. Right? Like, there's a scale problem here where if all your spending was appearing on balance sheet, investors might think very, very differently about your company. And then the other thing I would say is I still think the compare and contrast between the U.S.
50:29and China and their approaches to AI, both of them I think would agree that this is an existential problem of some sort or an existential competition. But they're following very different paths. And it does seem to me like the arc of history kind of leans towards stuff becoming cheaper. I think the arc of history bends towards China is what I thought you were going to say. That too. But it bends towards, you know, people generally want the cheaper thing and they want the thing that's like available now. And China seems to be going for that. The counter argument is that if you're going to use an open source model for some purposes, you have to supply your own electricity, right?
51:09You have to supply your own inference. You've got to host on your service. Like you still run into some constraints. And so rather than having it be on whatever, whoever else's data center, you got to find a way to run it yourself. Yeah, OK, but China has a leg up in electricity, too. Which was the point that Jensen Wong made. I mean, part of the reason, like, there's so much talk about this these days right now is that the industry insiders are saying a bunch of weird things. Paul mentioned the Sarah Fryer comment. Oh, yeah. And she sort of had to walk back, but then she said the same thing. Wasn't there that Sam Altman thing?
51:40Then there was the Sam Altman thing where he was asked, how are you going to pay for all this? And he said, look, you want to sell your shares or not? Which is like the interviewer probably thought he was a little defensive. Obviously, Jensen Wong talking recently about how China was going to win. Maybe he was saying that because he wanted to catalyze more action on solving some of the electricity problems in the U.S. But, you know, the very people at the center of this are saying things right now that, you know, what's interesting, too, is, you know, this bullwhip phenomenon. Everyone, as Paul described it, he didn't use the word bullwhip.
52:13But when everyone is trying to get their hands on the same gear, you got to wonder how sustained, what the other side of a bullwhip could look like. I don't know. We just got to do more episodes on this. Yeah, we have to. Shall we leave it there for now? Let's leave it there. All right. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Check out Paul Kodroski's writing at paulkodroski.com. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at CarmenArmond, Dashiell Bennett at Dashpot, and Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks.
52:42And for more OddLots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash OddLots with the daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash OddLots. And if you enjoy OddLots, if you like it when we talk about the AI, private, credit, leverage, subprime, economy, nexus, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you have to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there.
53:16Thanks for listening.
53:56We'll be right back.
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From the publisher
In recent weeks, there's been renewed anxiety about the sustainability of the AI boom. This is partly due to comments from OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar about a possible role for a government backstop in the AI infrastructure build out. We've also seen the stock market wobble, with many major tech names hit hard. But even with all these concerns, we continue to see new announcements all the time. Just this week, Anthropic said it would spend $50 billion on data center development in the US. So are we actually in a bubble? Our guest on this episode believes we are -- and not just any bubble. According to Paul Kedrosky, a longtime VC currently at SK Ventures, the AI bubble is like every previous bubble rolled into one. There's the real estate element. There's the tech element. And, increasingly, there are exotic financing structures being put in place to fund it all. And then on top of that, there's talk of government bailouts and backstops. In this episode, we walk through some of the math that would be required to justify all this spending, and how the seemingly existential stakes of 'winning the AI race' is causing an unsustainable investment binge.
Read more:
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