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AF Asa Fitch On WSJ's Take On the Week

“One thing that's kind of a question mark over all of this is this notion that NVIDIA wants to promote that the chips are commodities. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, has repeatedly talked about how these chips are quote-unquote fungible, almost as if they're a currency that you can just exchange from one thing to the next. That is to some degree true. … It's not always the case, though, because you have setups like Google's TPUs, for example.”

WSJ's Take On the Week · November 2026

“One thing that's kind of a question mark over all of this is this notion that NVIDIA wants to promote that the chips are commodities. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, has repeatedly talked about how these chips are quote-unquote fungible, almost as if they're a currency that you can just exchange from one thing to the next. That is to some degree true. … It's not always the case, though, because you have setups like Google's TPUs, for example.” — Asa Fitch, WSJ's Take On the Week

Context

Telis argued that bondholders are protected because someone will always want the data centers and chips if an AI company fails. Asa agrees it's a reasonable bet but questions how freely the hardware can really move between owners.

Transcript

WSJ's Take On the Week Around 22:09 into the episode
Miriam Gottfried

Yeah, you might as well clip this high coupon that you're getting paid from a junk bond like Core Weave's debt, right?

Telis Demos

Yeah. Maybe that's actually you're kind of taking advantage of an inefficiency there to some extent. Asa, does that sound crazy to

Asa Fitch

you? No, it doesn't sound crazy. I mean, it could be a good bet. You know, a lot of these companies were, you know, are doing pretty well in the end and will continue to have assets that have value. And even if those assets have to be sold off. Now, of course, one thing that's kind of a question mark over all of this is this notion that NVIDIA wants to promote that the GPUs, the chips are especially commodities. I mean, Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, has like repeatedly talked about how these chips are quote-unquote fungible, you know, almost as if they're a currency that you can just exchange from one thing to the next. That is to some degree true. You know, especially if you're talking about just NVIDIA's chips moving from one place to another, one owner to another. It's not always the case, though, because you have setups like Google's TPUs, for example. Sorry, what's a TPU?

Miriam Gottfried

I'm like out of the way. Sorry, that's

Asa Fitch

an abbreviation for tensor processing unit, which it's basically just a special AI chip that Google has developed over the years. It was entirely different. And a TPU only comes

Miriam Gottfried

is only made by Google. Is that?

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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