this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2026
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Top economist warns that the AI math doesn’t make sense: 'Profits are currently being funded by investors rather than earned from customers' (fortune.com)
submitted 1 day ago by sanitation@lemmy.today to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 20 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

'Profits are currently being funded by investors rather than earned from customers'

Which profits?

Ah, now I see the actual quote is: "[...] the AI boom's profits are currently being funded by investors rather than earned from customers." he means the profits of the shovel sellers, not AI profits.

[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

nvidia is the only one that is making money from this?

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Not just Nvidia.

For a start of who the shovel sellers might be, you can take a look at the list in his post that Torsten Slok used to calculate his margin numbers:

Note: Data as of 2Q 2026 and for OpenAI (1Q 2026 estimate from PitchBook) and Anthropic (2Q 2026 estimate from Financial Times). Averages are equal-weighted bucket averages of Energy & Grid (Constellation Energy, Vistra, NextEra Energy, Vertiv, Eaton, Arista Networks), Silicon & Equipment (Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Marvell, TSMC, SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics, Micron), Compute & Cloud (Super Micro, Dell Technologies, Foxconn, Equinix, Digital Realty, Amazon/AWS, Microsoft/Azure, Alphabet/Google Cloud, CoreWeave, Nebius) and Models & Applications (OpenAI, Anthropic). Sources: Bloomberg, PitchBook, Apollo Chief Economist

In short according to his research the people currently making a profit or at least positive margins, are the people who build chips and memory, who build energy infrastructure, and who build servers and data canters.

I would like to see the distinction between Servers (Super Micro, Dell Technologies, Foxconn) and Datacenters (Equinix, Digital Realty, Amazon/AWS, Microsoft/Azure, Alphabet/Google Cloud, CoreWeave, Nebius) but he seems to have put them together.

Also I heard from our local news that ABB (which is Swiss, Edit: apparently also Swedish) is profiting too, they belong in the power category.

And I wonder why Arista goes in the Energy category, I'd see them and Cisco, and Juniper, and Extreme, and Nokia in a separate network category.