Wall Street is suffering from analogy slop: There’s so much money going into AI that it has to be a bubble, and surely there are parallels to past bubbles. It’s the financial crisis all over again; it’s the 1929 stock market crash; it’s the year 2000.
The latest wave of this came this week, when Nvidia announced a $5 billion investment in Safe Superintelligence, the lab founded by AI pioneer Ilya Sutskever. SSI doesn’t even have a product — it says it has an AI breakthrough, but hasn’t shared any details publicly. Skepticism is warranted: AI breakthroughs don’t usually happen in secret.
But the investment could be viewed as Nvidia paying for a customer. Much of that $5 billion will go right back to Nvidia in the form of GPU purchases. Even if you assume SSI completely fails to ever make a dime, somebody else is going to want to use its big computer when SSI is done with it. We’ve already seen this play out with SpaceXAI and Meta, both of which leased out excess capacity at the supercomputers they built.
By definition, most AI companies won’t succeed, because they are startups. And Nvidia isn’t betting they will — it’s just betting that somebody is going to need its compute, and that’s a pretty safe bet.