Ed Zitron
Writes Where's Your Ed At, a newsletter on the AI industry's finances, and hosts the Better Offline podcast covering the same territory in audio.
“But it's very, like, just very simply, if customers are being forced to take early delivery, that is not demand. … And I just, it shows that there is a fundamental disconnection between what people perceive as AI demand and what is actual AI demand.”
The Tech Report · October 2026
Zitron reacts to a Business Insider report that Amazon is taking GPUs months before it can install them, under what the report calls an early rack receipt program. He reads it as NVIDIA pushing chips onto customers, which would mean GPU sales overstate real demand for AI compute.
Transcript
…industry is taking way more of these things than they currently need. What is scarce about that? Unless, of course, the vendor in question, NVIDIA, is saying, if you don't do this now, we will not sell you this in the future. And I think that's what's happening. It's classic Jensen Huang nonsense.
…a little bit. Which is that the I Told You So moments for you are coming a bit more frequently at the moment. And I'm obviously curious what you think that means in general, like what that increasing pace means. But I'm also curious how it feels to have the I Told You Sow moments coming quicker.
…sneaking in and get with a hair dryer. No, that's a joke. That already happened. But that's the thing. And people will get oity-toity, I'm sure, in the comments. And people responding to this will say, well, whoa, the hyperscalers do want these GPUs. They think they want them. They clearly have ordered too many, or at least they've ordered as many as they need, but way too early. I don't know. And I just, it shows that there is a fundamental disconnection between what people perceive as AI demand and what is actual AI demand. And this is a problem across the industry. It's a problem that I've been analyzing for three years, which is we cannot actually measure the true demand for AI. Because even when it comes to, and I know we're going to get into this as well, that ramp stat of 8% of OpenAI and Anthropics revenues, 1% of their customers. Except most of those customers are venture-backed AI startups who are selling…
If we go back to the rate at which Amazon is buying these racks, these GPUs, a delay of a few weeks would mean that the stack of warehouse GPUs would presumably then grow by billions of dollars. A four-week delay, that's another $3 to $5 billion you have waiting.
Yeah, exactly.
But I've seen in places, and I'm sure you have as well, that wait time for energy components is going up exponentially, let alone the construction itself. There's loads of these things, which are just there's the moratorium. There's lots of things that causing delays, which are a little bit longer…
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