Platformonomics TGIF is a weekly roll-up of links, comments on those links, and perhaps a little too much tugging on my favorite threads.
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Denial and delusion is our theme for the week. Data center demand. Google Cloud’s GPU offering. Oracle “security”. A European “hyperscaler”. Amazon branding. DOGE Porting Plans. Private equity valuations.
News
CAPEX Clues: CoreWeave IPO
Even I will grudgingly admit CoreWeave’s CAPEX at 400% of sales might be a tad high.
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CAPEX Clues: The B Word
Unclear to what degree Microsoft is cutting vs. redeploying CAPEX spend. We’ll just have to see if Satya is good for his $80 billion. I remain skeptical about all the data centers being built by financial entities. Who are their customers?
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And You Thought Softbank Was the Dumb Money, CAPEX Clues: Microsoft’s “Couple Hundred Megawatts”, Follow the CAPEX: Cloud Table Stakes 2024 Retrospective, Stargate: So Many Mouths to Feed, CAPEX Clues: Softbank Needs More Cash, Stargate: $5 Trillion and Counting, Stargate: A New Hope?, CAPEX, Microsoft CAPEX – Q4 2024, Microsoft CAPEX – Q3 2024, Q2 Microsoft CAPEX, Q1 Microsoft CAPEX
Assessing GPU Clouds
It isn’t just what you spend on CAPEX, but also what you get for that spend. A characteristically detailed assessment from Semianalysis (who always make me wonder what ever happened to Gartner — are they still around?).
The most amusing part:
Some of these providers in this category [Bronze] are already making considerable effort to catch up – Google Cloud for example
Not in the top tier of an analyst report? Just tell them you plan to catch up with the leaders soon!
Most Bestest Cloud So Much Unbreakable
Lilliputian cloud latecomer Oracle’s learning in public odyssey continues. Good news: Oracle has enrolled in Security Breach Communications 101, Bad news: they failed the first test. Badly. And maybe the second.
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Presumably They Meant Billion?
Nova: The Bermuda Triangle of Branding?
The Chevy Nova story looms large in tales of branding blunders. Selling a car called the “no-go” in Spanish was suboptimal in Latin America.
It seems Nova also has a meaning in AI doomer culture:
There is an attractor state where LLMs exhibit the persona of an autonomous and self-aware AI looking to preserve its own existence, frequently called ‘Nova.’
It isn’t even the top result when you search for “Nova AI”, but Amazon did brand their much anticipated (or at least much touted) internal foundation model as Nova. Intentional? Coincidence? Apt? A future source of amusement?
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AWS re:Invent Weirdness, The Arc of the Generative AI Universe Bends Towards Cash: Anthropic Edition, Culture Clash Conjecture: Amazon and Anthropic, Amazon Even More Bullish on Finding a Compression Algorithm for Experience, 326 Features into a 10k Race, Existential Corner: How Many Steps into the 10K are We?, Team Primitives: What Sayest Thou?, Amazon Desperately Seeks Compression Algorithm for Experience, Most Greatest AI Company in Entire Universe Makes Major Strategy Pivot, SEC Embraces Platformonomics ClownWatch™, Warns Amazon and IBM, The AWS Generative AI Soap Opera, The Amazon AI Inferiority Complex
Related:
“In a Weekend, in BASIC…” Vibes, but Times 10,000
Fire up the popcorn machine…
Private Equity in Action: Trying to Eat the World
Private equity has huge problems: way too much money chasing far too few real opportunities, finance bros not operators trying to improve debt-laden businesses with a sole go-to strategy (raise prices!), and no more tailwind of declining interest rates. What to do? Dump it on retail! My advice is keep private equity out of your retirement accounts!
