If Nvidia is a bank, it's an Islamic Bank. They don't take interest (usury), they share profits and risk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_banking_and_finance
Imagine a scenario where the AI bubble bursts and AI companies and neoclouds go bankrupt en masse, and then a huge rebound occurs when AI has a delayed takeoff. Nvidia ends up with a massive amount of compute on its hands from its backstop deals, and it also owns assets from failed companies when profits start to grow. New startups running using Hugging take the place of OpenAI and Anthropic when their compute assets are divided between survivors like Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta.
If/when there is an AI crash, any number of small startups can buy compute for the price of electricity without anyone wanting to buy them. That is when the real innovation happens. The top of the hype cycle is usually more about getting rich quick and buying and shutting down competition.
> They don't take interest (usury)
Nvidia booked $496 million in interest income in Q2 alone [1].
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1045810/000104581026... page 15
The Knights Templar did the same thing, they just charged appropriate fees for every service instead of interest. Risk has to be paid for, call it interest or fees, No real difference.
And then when the kings ran out of money, they sacked the Knights and whoopsies, looks like the knights had no real money as they spent it as quickly as they could maintaining their financial network... Sound familiar?
[flagged]
While I dislike this take, when the dust settles we will have compute clusters orders of magnitude larger than anything that existed in 2023.
If demand vanishes for the 3 million cards Amazon just bought, then something will be done with them. The AI market may end up in a bizarre jepson's paradox of rotation between inference use cases and model training.
The OP I was replying to edited the comment, so I wasn't even considering that scenario. The original comment I replied to was about islamic banking comparison (up to the Wikipedia article link), dude added the scenario after my comment.
[dead]
I find "bro" and "dudebro" to be such fascinating slurs. The previous incarnation was "neckbeard" / "obese dude living in mom's basement", so "dudebro" comes across almost like a compliment.