Comment by BlobberSnobber

I've made that same point myself in the past. It's more of an accidental moat though - and not one they can defend for very long if they're no longer getting value out of those components themselves.

I saw an interesting observation the other day that Jensen Huang has played this game the best because his company is the one actually selling real products and making real money in return. If all the AI giants are buying up huge amounts of hardware speculatively because they assume they will need those data centres in the future and then the bottom falls out of the market then it's the AI companies left holding the baby. And if we do get to a point where local models are competitive then the OpenAIs and Anthropics of the industry might face real difficulties but it would just be a different market for Nvidia to also be selling real hardware and still in exchange for real money.