Pretty much. OpenAI will "give" AMD 78bln for 10% of the stock and the chips openAI actually wants. This whole ordeal has been publicly paraded like OpenAI and AMD partnering up, which has already pumped up AMD stock price by 45%. Thus openAI will eventually get their 78bln (which they actually never had in the first place) back in AMD stock.

So who actually pays the 78bln? The simple answer is AMD stock holders, currently the ones who have bought the stock after the announcement and later the ones who bought it before it crashed. The more complex answer is that the stock market at this point is just a speculative mess where numbers are made up because the price isn't dictated by what the company is currently capable of doing but rather what the company potentially could be doing in the future. Who knows who is actually paying for it because AMD stocks will get used elsewhere (for example as collateral in a loan) and the economic growth with absorb the costs. In short, we might as well imagine nobody paid for the chips.

In short, brace for another "once in a lifetime" economic crash.

[–] GreenShimada@lemmy.world 19 points 4 days ago (10 children)

This isn't the way economic bubbles are typically structured. At all.

Typical economic bubbles are built on speculative investment leveraging debt until the whole thing reaches a point where the debt can't realistically account for possible growth anymore. This would be OpenAI asking SoftBank for $78B to buy chips that have at most, a maximal 5 year life cycle, and then OpenAI not having cash on hand to pay down that $78B in 2 years.

Using this stock reacharound is actual money changing hands. Yes, stock dividends and sales are part of that, but it's not debt. It's certainly not sustainable, but it's not something that will lead to bankruptcy for OpenAI or NVIDIA or AMD if they fail to turn profits. But the money is real at the time it's moved around. Surprisingly, the LLM crowd has been fairly consistent in not running to highly leveraged debt for funding.

This is a pump and dump scheme if anything, and seems like a great way to find out later that people buying stock in AMD "invested" in shrinking their portfolio over the long term. IMO only a fool would buy stocks that funded this, but it's a slow-mo bubble for those people, not the economy in general.

[–] Goodeye8@piefed.social 23 points 3 days ago (9 children)

Money did exchange hands but it had to come from somewhere, OpenAI doesn't have 78bln just lying around. Someone somewhere took debt so OpenAI could pay that price and OpenAI is planning on paying back that debt with AMD stock. That why I said the simple answer is that the people buying AMD stock are the ones paying for those chips. But these things don't happen in an instance, they take time which is why I said the complex answer is that nobody really knows who is going to pay it back. As a simplistic example, while the "dump" of AMD stocks hasn't happened someone can borrow money against the overpriced AMD stock. Now, if whoever gave the actual money to OpenAI comes asking for their 78bln back and OpenAI doesn't have it they will dump the AMD stocks to pay it back and then the person who used AMD stocks as collateral will be asked "Your collateral is now useless, give me more collateral or pay me back" and that money will be found elsewhere until someone goes broke and the debt gets defaulted. Of course that won't happen as long as nobody comes asking for the spent money.

In my eyes this deal is a speculative investment leveraging debt. OpenAI itself doesn't have the debt but it is somewhere because the actual liquidated money had to come from somewhere. And there is speculative investment with the hopes of AMD stocks going up enough to offset that debt. The 78bln might not end up as debt for OpenAI, but it might end up as a different debt for the loans that used propped up AMD stock as collateral. IMO it doesn't really matter where exactly the debt ends up because if the bubble pops AMD stocks are also going to take a hit and someone somewhere is going to end up paying for the debt that was caused by this 78bln deal.

[–] humanspiral@lemmy.ca 6 points 3 days ago

The 78bln might not end up as debt for OpenAI

AFAIU, the GPUs are free for OpenAI. They will sell their free stock to pay AMD for GPUs. OpenAI is already on the hook for over $1T in other commitments, and debt will be very expensive for them.

load more comments (8 replies)

load more comments (13 replies)