Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • And now they will complain that they need loans guarentees due to a lack of equity to finance new investments. I await the announcement of fresh price rises.

    Every stick of DDR5 should come with a share, so future dividends go back to the people who financed this insanity.

    by sandworm101
  • If a bottle of Scotch can come with a deed to land, I'm okay with RAM coming with stocks
    by dylan604
  • > Every stick of DDR5 should come with a share, so future dividends go back to the people who financed this insanity.

    This will only lead to hyperscalers getting wealthier.

    by profsummergig
  • I feel like I've seen this headline (followed a week later by its inversion) countless times in the last 6 months. I have little doubt this is a bubble, but also very little certainty as to when or how it will "correct".

    The KOSPI is almost not worth talking about as any serious signal. It has a circuit breaker drop almost weekly (again followed in no time with an equally high rebound) and basically has come to represent how insanely the South Korean market has become pure gambling (with retail investors absurdly leveraged). Sure , it's hard to image this doesn't lead to some disaster in the long run, but these fluctuations have become par for the course.

    by crystal_revenge
  • In terms of parallel headlines we're in the 1998 :-). This was market behavior during the last 18 months of the dot com bubble, then it burst. Plan accordingly? Always hard to time these things.
    by ChuckMcM
  • Snap back to reality, ope, there goes gravity
    by teaearlgraycold
  • I think that a gpt 5.6 level model might sustain the growth. We're seeing talented users squeeze non trivial math and code out these tiers of models.
    by vatsachak
  • I’m wondering if this is leveraged investors in KOSPI, where retail > institutional traders. More leverage = more volatility. If it actually IS a correction, I’m hoping that some of these data center projects, the ones that are REITs wearing a funny hat, can stop.
    by klodolph
  • Both Samsung and SK Hynix had record earnings and stocks dropped 15%. It might be localized leverage craze, I am not sure it will have any impact on actual RAM production/data center construction.
    by Good4boothee
  • So is this good news for the companies that have taken a hit as AI stocks have climbed, and semiconductor shortages have rattled investors?
    by apparent
  • I'd be cautious describing market sell offs as good news for anyone since the fall out could be pretty bad (that's a "worst case" scenario, so far nothing like that)

    There's some winners though, people dumping AI stocks are mostly buying stocks elsewhere, Apple being an obvious winner[0].

    [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/28/apple-sec...

    by benrutter

  •      Cheng Chye Hsern [...] said Apple is one the few tech firms "not taking part in the AI race"
    They certainly did take part in the AI race. It's just that their public attempts so far have not been very successful
    by throwa356262
  • They didn’t spend capital anywhere close to what their peers did on AI.
    by shaunkoh
  • There is undoubtedly a bubble in the sense that AI is crazy overfinanced, and there's a semiconductor shortage - chip makers usually have like mid to low two digit margins for manufacturers of complex chips like NVIDIA, and single digit for ones commodities like memory.

    The fact that these companies are either selling these things at multiples of their previous prices, and even then, their P/E ratios are often 10,20,40 shows there's a bidding war for these chips.

    It's too much money chasing a fixed amount of product, and the only way to scale the industry is by scaling the entire supply chain, which is a long and expensive process, and certainly isn't fixed by throwing more money at companies.

    If existing hardware was sold at the usual margins, all this stuff would cost a tiny fraction of the current price.

    This is clearly a precarious position.

    by torginus
  • There are also circular deals and self-financing happening from the likes of Nvidia.
    by grey-area
  • I do not work in finance, perhaps someone here can tell me if I have the wrong impression on the situation here:

    Tech giants with AI interests, hyperscalers, have used "special purpose vehicles" — shell companies — to quietly issue credit to AI companies, and these AI companies have used this line of credit to purchase/lease compute hardware/infrastructure primarily from their creditors, inflating the demand and price of said hardware.

    And much of the future infrastructure has yet to be constructed, and the hardware available now will at some point become obsolete or at least decrease in collateral value.

    But the credit doesn't actually come from the hyperscalers themselves, as it exceeds their actual cashflow, so it comes from investment banks and/or private investors/lenders... who actually absorb the majority of the risk then?

    And the big banks are currently offloading their loans at discounted rates, while simultaneously trading in swaps against hyperscalers?

    I presume the reason for the shell companies/private funding shadiness, is to keep debt off-the-record and perhaps avoid regulation / exceed risk tolerance limits.

    Just how exposed are the banks and the hyperscalers in all this?

    by wanda
  • I'm cautiously optimistic that this is the beginning of a much needed correction toward sobriety with regards to AI investment. The macro effects of all the money going into AI are apocalyptic. Maybe we can take some deep breaths and move forward a little smarter if the hype fest slows down a tad. And if we're lucky, eventually be able to afford RAM again.
    by elliotec
  • > move forward a little smarter

    Based on everything I've seen, this is an all-out sprint to whatever the goalpost is - superintelligence, AGI, singularity. Whoever is first will win, everyone else will lose.

    I don't know if it's true or not, but it seems to explain the current direction of tech and leads me to believe no CEO is going to allow his company to slow down.

    by cosmicgadget
  • slow down in investment will happen only when token usage plateaus, until then companies will keep pouring money into this fire pit
    by winfredJa
  • I hope you’re right. It does seem like we’re finally coming down off the peak of the hype cycle. I use Claude Code daily, but man I am just tired of hearing about AI. I’m tired of holding off on backing up my home server because disks are so expensive. I’m tired of HN being 50% articles about AI.
    by cautiouscat
  • > The macro effects of all the money going into AI are apocalyptic

    The doomer discourse around AI is about as overhyped as the investors are. It's two parties getting pumped up by social media who will be disappointed it's just some new higher economic tier rather than a quick boom or bust.

    It always takes twice as long for new markets to fully mature. Industries need to actually adapt technology before they see serious productivity gains (including coding). For now lots of businesses are haphazardly slapping AI on everything and early failures due to immaturity are being used to project long term negative outcomes. While chip and energy development will take even longer as unlike software it's full of the usual baggage of developing things IRL (long term high capital costs, local politics, regulatory compliance, supply chains, etc).

    by dmix
  • I had to buy an SSD and some RAM to help my son build a PC.

    The SSD cost 30% more than I paid two years ago and was half the capacity (1TB). The RAM cost double what I paid two years ago, was slower, and was half the capacity (32GB).

    by indemnity