It's like someone thinking that they are SOOOO smart, they are going to get rich selling shovels in the gold rush. So they overpay for the land, they overpay for the factory, they overpay for their sales staff.
And then someone else starts giving away shovels for free.
> And then someone else starts giving away shovels for free.
Ah, I see -- it's more like a "level 2 gold rush".
So a level 1 gold rush is: There's some gold in the ground, nobody knows where it is, so loads of people buy random bits of land for the chance to get rich. Most people lose, a handful of people win big. But the retailers buying shovels at wholesale and selling them at a premium make a safe, tidy profit.
But now that so many people know the maxim, "In a gold rush, sell shovels", there's now a level 2 gold rush: A rush to serve the miners rushing to find the gold. So loads of retailers buy loads and loads of shovels and set up shop in various places, hoping the miners will come. Probably some miners will come, and perhaps those retailers will make a profit; but not nearly as much as they expect, because there's guaranteed to be competition. But the company making the shovels and selling them at a premium makes a tidy profit.
So NVIDIA in this story is the manufacturer selling shovels to retailers; and all the companies building out massive GPU clouds are the retailers rushing to serve miners. NVIDIA is guaranteed to make a healthy profit off the GPU cloud rush as long as they play their cards right (and they've always done a pretty decent job of that in the past); but the vast majority of those rushing to build GPU clouds are going to lose their shirts.
And/or exploiting the legal infrastructure around intellectual property rights to make sure only hobbyists and geologists can use the shovels without paying through the nose or getting sued into oblivion.
If your company grows to 700 million monthly active users, then most probably you can make your own AI department and train your own models. I guess people's aspirations are very high in this space, but let's be realistic.
And then someone else starts giving away shovels for free.