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The Tech Investor's avatar

Great read

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The Gore Report's avatar

Great article! I don’t think this AI Spend will ever stop. The beginning of the year with those Microsoft warnings , a pullback in CapEx ai spending sounded like it was coming for Hyperscalers. That ideology from just 6 months ago feels like a half a decade ago

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Eric Flaningam's avatar

Certainly agree on the last point! Hard to predict what spend will look like; to your point, commentary seems to change by the month

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The Gore Report's avatar

With all these regulations being rolled back along with pro business agenda from this administration, I don’t see anything getting in the way 👌🤝💯

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Sanjiv's avatar

I agree the momentum is strong currently but nothing grows forever.

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The Gore Report's avatar

Correct. There will be a correction.. but I don’t think there will be a bubble bursting like in 2000. This AI thing is legit and being funded by legit companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon… your thoughts?

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Sanjiv's avatar

That sounds right. All these companies plus Meta are unprecedented free cash flow machines and are ploughing their own money into these huge investment. currently the cloud hyperscalers say they are responding to excess demand. Meta is a slightly different case. if at some point they find they have overinvested and they have to write them off there will be an opportunity cost in that the free cash flow could have been returned to shareholders via buybacks and dividends.

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The Gore Report's avatar

You know what you’re talking about… so I subscribed to you!!! please do the same! 🤝

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From Boardroom to BardzoDobrze's avatar

Super insightful piece, Eric. The acceleration of Azure through OpenAI is stunning, imho feels like AWS’s 2014 moment, but with inference rather than SaaS.

One question: do you think OpenAI are evolving more into infrastructure players or staying in the application layer?

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Eric Flaningam's avatar

I don’t think they can be separated. Quantitatively OpenAI has more traction at the app layer (chatgpt), anthropic at the model layer (especially for coding).

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Amir Ahmad's avatar

I understand all the hyperscalers want to spend more on a white space, but when you look at the industrial companies, all of them are speaking of demand 2,3 even 4 years on critical products which says the physical spend is still to continue?

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