But if they're just scaling inventory, debt makes way more sense because they payoff is almost instant as soon as they fulfill the order to the customer. I agree the math is hazier when you're talking about massive capex, growing headcount, or other longer-horizon capital commitments. But if they just need to buy inputs to sell output to complete an order backlog, selling a portion of the company seems odd.
The people running the company are people who lived through the tech crash, and saw how quickly the entire economy around them can evaporate. At Sun, only slightly exaggerating, they went from flying high and controlling a market segment, to seeing all the demand evaporate and customers vanish, leaving the company holding the bag on just massive piles of inventory, basically in a day.
When you sell shovels, even slight downturns are massively exaggerated because the shovels can be resold, and if some of their customers go under, it's not just that demand that goes away, it's all the demand that can be satisfied by their customers purchasing second hand servers from the bankruptcies instead.
No-one can really say how long this bubble will last. Might pop tomorrow, might be a decade. But if Oxide funds inventory on debt, and the bubble pops, they go with it. Whereas if they fund on equity, and it pops, they will come out the other side just fine. The cost of this is that the old stockholders have a slightly lower upside.