So when the bubble pops the companies making the shovels (TSMC, NVIDIA) might still have the money they got for their products and some of the ex-AI companies might least be able to sell standard compliant GPUs on the wider market.

And Google will end up with lots of useless super specialized custom hardware.

It seems unlikely that large matrix multipliers will become useless. If nothing else, Google uses AI extensively internally. It already did in ways that weren’t user-visible long before the current AI boom. Also, they can still put AI overviews on search pages regardless of what the stock market does. They’re not as bad as they used to be, and I expect they’ll improve.

Even if TPU’s weren’t all that useful, they still own the data centers and can upgrade equipment, or not. They paid for the hardware out of their large pile of cash, so it’s not debt overhang.

Another issue is loss of revenue. Google cloud revenue is currently 15% of their total, so still not that much. The stock market is counting on it continuing to increase, though.

If the stock market crashes, Google’s stock price will go down too, and that could be a very good time to buy, much like it was in 2008. There’s been a spectacular increase since then, the best investment I ever made. (Repeating that is unlikely, though.)

> And Google will end up with lots of useless super specialized custom hardware.

If it gets to the point where this hardware is useless (I doubt it), yes Google will have it sitting there. But it will have cost Google less to build that hardware than any of the companies who built on Nvidia.

How could Google's custom hardware become useless? They've used it for their business for years now and will do so for years into the future. It's not like their hardware is LLM specific. Google cannot lose with their vast infrastructure.

Meanwhile OpenAI et al dumping GPUs while everyone else is doing the same will get pennies on the dollar. It's exactly the opposite to what you describe.

I hope that comes to pass, because I'll be ready to scoop up cheap GPUs and servers.

I think people are confusing the bubble popping with AI being over. When the dot-com bubble popped, it's not like internet infrastructure immediately became useless and worthless.