This reminds me of around 2002 when I wrote an article looking at how all the web behemoths at the time were claiming profitability through ad sales, but actually the vast majority of ads were from one web behemoth advertising on an other's site and vice versa.
qaq 5 hours ago [-]
Same as capacity swaps in telecom of that era
Sam6late 3 hours ago [-]
This is How Larry Elisson beat Musk for a short while although Oracle was struggling.' The deals among Oracle, Nvidia, and OpenAI have raised concerns about their circular and potentially risky nature. Oracle is reportedly spending tens of billions on Nvidia's advanced chips, Nvidia plans to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, and OpenAI uses Oracle's cloud infrastructure through Microsoft's Azure, creating a closed loop of financing and business. Some analysts warn this creates a reflexive loop or "dangerous bubble" where valuations may be inflated artificially by the circular flow of capital and resources, reminiscent of past booms that ended in sharp market corrections.
athrowaway3z 31 minutes ago [-]
It's worth noting Elisson is 2 years older than Trump.
What's he going to do with all that money, and what does he care for the risk it's bad or shady?
Worst case, he got to be #1 for a bit for a few dozen billion, best case he's hoping AGI will extend his life before he croaks.
victorbjorklund 15 minutes ago [-]
Doubt he believes that. Getting AGI (whatever that actually means) means we are still far away from reversing ageing.
willvarfar 8 minutes ago [-]
(Interestingly, some of the world's dictators do seem to have an interest in the current state of the art in prolonging life. For example Xi and Putin chatted about organ replacement https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr70rvrd41ko)
mschuster91 4 minutes ago [-]
> What's he going to do with all that money, and what does he care for the risk it's bad or shady?
The thing that unites Ellison, Trump, Musk, Thiel and a fair few of the other politically active billionaires is the obsession with "legacy" - they want to leave their mark in the history books, figures which will likely be remembered and taught in schools in thousands of years similar to Roman emperors.
Musk is the most obvious with his obsession of settling (and eventually dying) on Mars, Trump is dreaming of getting a Nobel Peace Prize (if only to not let Obama be the only US President who got one), and the rest is hunting for the "invented AGI" crown.
neuronic 26 minutes ago [-]
What does Ellisons personal wealth have to do with this? The concern is that the circular pattern of shifting money between these companies is artificially inflating the stock market to heights that will crash very very badly when this bubble finally pops.
nl 1 hours ago [-]
Oracle most certainly is not struggling. Even putting aside the NVidia deal, their cloud business is thriving.
Traubenfuchs 1 hours ago [-]
They give you 4 nodes with 1 vcpu and 6GB RAM each for free forever by the way. Most other stuff has a free tier too.
I used it to learn terraform and have a kubernetes cluster running.
I know it's always trendy to bash oracle and simp for AWS, but it is THE best option for learning and hobbyists.
jeswin 11 minutes ago [-]
That's very cool. I was going to get a hetzner for some hobby projects.
Can you get that without adding a payment mechanism? For some reason, I'd be more cautious about putting my card into Oracle's offering than anyone else.
Traubenfuchs 8 minutes ago [-]
> Can you get that without adding a payment mechanism?
No!
There are actually two free tiers.
The limited free tier you get without adding a CC and then this advanced "always free" tier I am using, where you have to use and verify a CC and have to pay big bucks if you mess up.
You can also get all of that in a single node, which makes for a fairly beefy build server :)
NewJazz 1 hours ago [-]
Uh, you can get that level of compute locally easy peasy.
Learning terraform isn't hard, it's what you stitch together with terraform that is hard.
bartekrutkowski 36 minutes ago [-]
I think the point here is that free beats easy peasy, especially when learning a new skill, where your easy peasy isn't their easy peasy. And getting something up and running on Oracle Cloud with Terraform is nowhere near easy peasy for someone who never did anything with Terraform ;)
heywoods 3 hours ago [-]
Is it fair to say OpenAI is in a sense “washing” the money passing between Nvidia and Oracle? And instead of taking a cut in the traditional money laundering they are enjoying massive valuation gains?
When the fed investigates this does it matter if one of the 3 companies is not a publicly traded company?
scott_w 3 hours ago [-]
I guess you could see it like that but I don’t think it’s “wash trading” in the sense that they’re coordinating it. I don’t really know what the fed would investigate here.
XorNot 2 hours ago [-]
What you're missing is that real value can be created in these exchanges - Nvidia really makes chips for example.
The issue is that it's an industry of investment which exists solely to power more investment in AI - the entire chain is still assuming that someone will eventually pay for this.
At the end of the day all that money leaks out to employees and suppliers...but no one those people transact with may have any interest in buying what was produced.
neuronic 21 minutes ago [-]
That's only really value if the chips are useful and if there are people buying the chips for something they want to do with them.
It's entirely based on the perception that LLM training & inference is here to stay at ever growing scales when the shortcomings of Artificial Dreaming are increasingly scrutinized. Not all businesses want to end up paying refunds to their clients like Deloitte [1] because the LLM hallucinated crap into their reports (and they failed to correct it).
>By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto Ponzi scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth. So they invested in new Internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in. When I realized this one day, sitting in my cubicle, I jumped up like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of "Eureka!" I was shouting "Sell!"
themafia 4 hours ago [-]
That's not how Ponzi schemes work. Yahoo had a defacto _monopoly_ and the market had bad discovery leading to bad price information. There was no point at which the internet was /not/ worth investing in and everyone who had experience with it knew that.
The real problem seemed to be that you can only put so much money into pets.com before it becomes stupid. You had more short term investment capital than could be _effectively_ spent at the time. The long term players, as usual, avoided the Archimedian idealism, and were heavily rewarded anyways.
pg has startup brains.
noitpmeder 3 hours ago [-]
pg has completely clairvoyant vision, if only about historical events
hn_throwaway_99 3 hours ago [-]
Why is it so popular to "akshually, Ponzi schemes are different!" these days?
Words have meaning in context, and calling something a "Ponzi scheme" these days means any pyramid-like system that only works as long as new investors come to the table, because that new investor money is the sole source of gains for earlier investors. But once you run out of new investors, which is inevitable, the whole thing collapses. What pg described was exactly a Ponzi scheme in that sense, even if it wasn't a deliberate scam. And that's very different from other types of business ventures that eventually fail because of the more "normal" reason that they just don't gain traction.
themafia 2 hours ago [-]
> Words have meaning in context
And you do recognize the context of those words was 15 years ago at this point?
> was exactly a Ponzi scheme in that sense, even if it wasn't a deliberate scam
There are better terms of art to describe the scenario. If we lacked for those words I might grant you this point, but since we don't, I find the description lacking in precision if not completely faulty.
> the more "normal" reason that they just don't gain traction.
Is that actually the "normal reason" most businesses fail? I'm not sure it is.
mythz 2 hours ago [-]
All clearly designed to cash in on the speculative value being given to AI companies.
Strategically I thought OpenAI's deal of getting 10% of AMD for driving their stock price to $600 was a pretty clever way of creating $97 Billion from nothing - effectively paying for the GPUs they'd purchase.
At the same time I would've thought this insider pump and cash-in strategy would be somehow illegal, but I guess anything goes with this administration.
4 minutes ago [-]
baq 2 hours ago [-]
it'd be illegal if they bought on the public market... but they bought directly from AMD, so nothing to see here, move along. music is still playing.
ksynwa 3 hours ago [-]
People are bringing up the AMD deal but isn't that giving it too much credence? The deal hasn't had any material consequences yet apart from stock market fluctuations. The bigger problem for me is that AMD doesn't seem like is going to be a player of note in the AI sphere. So this deal like many other big money AI deals look like optics to me.
returnInfinity 2 hours ago [-]
This is fueled by the parabolic token usage. If token usage continues to grow parabolic, then these are the most genius deals made.
If token usage declines because of high prices, look at what happened to SBF.
Ianjit 1 hours ago [-]
I notice that when I ask ChatGPT a question the answers I get back seem more verbose than they were a year ago. Where a 1-2 line response would be sufficient GPT delivers a sprawling essay. Overall the value of the answer has probably gone down, but tokens are up.
gruez 8 hours ago [-]
For an interesting interpretation of the recent AMD-OpenAI deal, see Matt Levine's column from a few days ago:
> OpenAI: We would like six gigawatts worth of your chips to do inference.
> AMD: Terrific. That will be $78 billion. How would you like to pay?
> OpenAI: Well, we were thinking that we would announce the deal, and that would add $78 billion to the value of your company, which should cover it.
> AMD: …
> OpenAI: …
> AMD: No I’m pretty sure you have to pay for the chips.
> OpenAI: Why?
> AMD: I dunno, just seems wrong not to.
> OpenAI: Okay. Why don’t we pay you cash for the value of the chips, and you give us back stock, and when we announce the deal the stock will go up and we’ll get our $78 billion back.
> AMD: Yeah I guess that works though I feel like we should get some of the value?
> OpenAI: Okay you can have half. You give us stock worth like $35 billion and you keep the rest.
Levine is fantastic on all sorts of bizarre financial dealings. Money Stuff is such a good daily read even though I don't work in a financial job
Fade_Dance 6 hours ago [-]
I would be convinced that he's some sort of super well calibrated financial article AI engine (due to consistency of output and breadth of coverage), except that I've been reading his column long before LLMs were on the scene.
fluoridation 7 hours ago [-]
There's no way someone would be stupid enough to part with $x worth of product and $ 0.5 x worth of stock in exchange for $x, is there? Honestly, it's stupid to even make such an offer. What prevents AMD from turning it around on them?
> AMD: Oh, since you put it like that, why don't you pay us $x for the chips and give us $ 0.5 x worth of stock? When your market cap rises by $ 0.5 x you'll get the money for those stocks. And hell, it might even rise further, giving you back some of the money for those chips. You're really robbing me blind with this deal, you'd be a fool not to take it!
gruez 6 hours ago [-]
>What prevents AMD from turning it around on them?
Matt's telling is a little facetious, so the exact negotiation probably didn't go like that. More importantly, OpenAI has better options. If they want to pay AMD cash for chips, they could do that without also giving up their equity. The same can't be said for AMD. They're the second choice when it comes to GPUs, and they're desperate for market share, so they're willing to cut deals like this. Without this deal OpenAI probably would have bought Nvidia chips with cash.
> NVIDIA intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI progressively as each gigawatt is deployed.
bigwheels 7 hours ago [-]
AMD might do it just to try and be (stay) relevant in the market. Prior to this, discussions about AMD were slim to none, "just another inference card manufacturer". Now they're shining in the spotlight. Mission accomplished.
giancarlostoro 6 hours ago [-]
If you really think about it though, inference is the end goal for most AI models. So I don't see "inference only" being necessarily bad, especially if you get more bang for your buck.
zenmac 5 hours ago [-]
Oh this just seems like the typical financial dealings that City of London invented to obfuscating ownership of holdings half millennium ago. Some would event argue this obfuscation what transferred power from the military to bankers. And it is how we end up in this transnational corporation where the public really have no idea who is owning what and who is actually running the show here.
Now we are just transferring the power from bankers -> tech/AI.
tshaddox 6 hours ago [-]
Does he explain why the valuation of the company would go up by $78 billion on the public news that AMD agreed to give $78 billion of goods to OpenAI for free?
wmf 5 hours ago [-]
It validates that MI450 works. Jensen was saying other GPUs are so bad that companies wouldn't even take them for free and then OpenAI said no, we actually will take AMD GPUs for free. They're not that bad.
AdieuToLogic 5 hours ago [-]
This reminds me of the AOL Time Warner merger. "Back in the day", America Online (AOL) had a valuation large enough to pull it off:
It was the largest merger in history when completed with
the combined value of the companies at $360 billion.[0]
After less than a decade, once ISP's became a thing, the AOL part of the new company shriveled into nothing and was spun off. It still exists, in name if not anything recognizable to what it once was.
It’s just AMD levering up on its on stock. Similar to MSTR. AMD is taking a loan against its own shares to build gpu’s hoping to rent them out via OpenAI in the future. No point in betting against it, because it can’t get margin called until OpenAI goes bankrupt. Which isn’t happening until OpenAI is worth $10 trillion first.
From the OpenAI side, it’s an amazing deal. $35B profit in one day… at a pe of 30, it’s already worth a trillion if it can repeat similar deals every year.
latchkey 6 hours ago [-]
MSTR can't print more of what they are levering against.
gsky 12 minutes ago [-]
HN community predictions so far are
2000s: cloud bubble
2010s: crypto bubble
2020s: AI bubble
Seems modern economy works different. I missed cloud and crypto and dont wana miss AI so im investing about 20% of my income.
credit_guy 8 hours ago [-]
I don't understand why they are calling these deals circular. OpenAI is buying Nvidia and AMD chips. Oracle is also buying Nvidia chips. OpenAI is buying datacenters from Oracle, which will be powered by the chips Oracle buys from Nvidia. This is one directional: hardware makers (Nvidia and AMD) sell either to datacenter makers (Oracle), or to AI firms (like OpenAI). That's it. No circular deals.
But "circular deals" has such a nice ring to it, that you hear it everywhere nowadays. People are just hungry for negative soundbites.
A stronger counterpoint to the circular deals suggestion is at the end of the article, which reads
> Michael Intrator, CoreWeave’s CEO, acknowledged the circular financing worries in a recent interview with Bloomberg News, but said the public concerns will dissipate as more businesses adopt AI.
> “When Microsoft comes to us to buy infrastructure to deliver to its clients who are consuming 365 or Copilot, I don't care what the narrative is about circular financing,” Intrator said. “They have end users that are consuming it.”
It's on you to decide then if end users are actually getting value / paying for AI products.
blibble 7 hours ago [-]
> It's on you to decide then if end users are actually getting value / paying for AI products.
"Brutally honest and cheerfully sarcastic insights on Microsoft’s low-code and AI technology, business apps, and the business of software - written by Jukka Niiranen"
What credibility does this guy have? Sounds like someone that has an axe to grind.
cess11 50 minutes ago [-]
He has been working in IT and business for a quarter of a century, and the last fifteen years as a MICROS~1 consultant.
In the end with most of these deals its the shareholders paying through market cap dilution. Given the current market structure (the big companies are tech companies) there's PLENTY of capital for OpenAI to fund their expansion.
They've discovered a cheat code IMO. Instead of using and raising money themselves, use their reputation/popularity and use their suppliers market caps (e.g. NVIDIA, AMD, etc). The deal makes sense as long as the value projected to be added (i.e. via efficiency gains, loss of jobs, changing society, etc) exceeds the capital dilution for the supplier; they use their equity but the leftover equity value increase makes up for it.
Given all the passive investing, and funds invested in the top tech companies this is a VERY large pool of capital. It however increases leverage if the value doesn't materialise.
agentcoops 7 hours ago [-]
I agree with your general point: there is a tendency to group not least these deals together without distinction as confirmation of a pre-existing belief that the AI bubble is soon to collapse. The latter certainly might be true, but we should be careful about too quickly deciding what evidence supports it. I am inclined to strictly separate:
(a) the NVIDIA deal as a vendor subsidizing one of their largest clients, which perhaps signals market weakness;
from (b) the AMD deal as a non-market-leading vendor trying to entice a new enterprise client, who will only be able to use AMD's chips for serious training after significant (and risky) collaboration to improve their product offering.
This distinction is important to me because I see more concrete evidence for a possible material drop in NVIDIA's business short- to medium-term than a collapse of the sector as a whole. The chips act clearly shut them out unexpectedly from their second largest market and now it seems likely that Chinese chips will be competitive for training sooner than expected. Indeed, if Chinese AI firms are suddenly able to obtain even a roughly approximate product at considerably less cost, OpenAI will suddenly find themselves at a cost if not compute disadvantage to their Eastern competitors. It isn't a surprise, then, that OpenAI is now looking to reduce their present vendor lock-in with NVIDIA.
Overall, it's not great for the latter if they lose access to their second largest market, suddenly have viable competitors in their home market, and either lose some of a major client's business or have to significantly reduce pricing to retain it.
schumpeter 8 hours ago [-]
Nvidia is also investing hundreds of billions in OpenAI.
credit_guy 7 hours ago [-]
Yes. OpenAI is also investing in AMD. This was discussed yesterday on HN, following some very good explanation by Matt Levine at Bloomberg. This is a way for one party to reduce some risk, by enjoying some upside in the equity of the counterparty.
But this is not circular. Circular would be if I sell you an apple worth $0.25 for $2.00, and then you sell it back to me for $2.00, or other similar amount, and I get to mark all the apples in my inventory at $2.00 and show a huge profit (on paper). One can create variations of this blatant deal. Like I sell you some rubber for 10 times the market price, you make a balloon and then I buy the balloon for 10 times the market price. I may not have other balloons in my inventory, but plenty of rubber, and I show some nice profit. One can imagine other, fancier deals.
But in the case of AMD and NVidia, and OpenAI and Oracle, the direction is clear. OpenAI has a clear need for compute. They can buy it directly from NVidia and AMD, or indirectly from Oracle. They can buy it with hard cash (of which they don't have that much), or with their own equity, or some form of deal that offers the seller an upside in OpenAI's equity.
But there is not back and forth buying of the same item, or of rubber/balloons. All the deals seem legit. Is it possible that all the future compute will not be needed, because the AI craze will fizzle. It is, lots of things are possible. But that's general business risk.
lelanthran 7 minutes ago [-]
> But there is not back and forth buying of the same item, or of rubber/balloons. All the deals seem legit.
Some, certainly, but the vendor-financing deals certainly look circular to the casual observer. Microsoft invests $X into OpenAI for a 51% (or whatever) stake, and that investment then goes straight back to Microsoft to pay for compute credits.
Or Nvidia invests[1] $100m into OpenAI, which OpenAI then turns around and pays back to Nvidia for compute.
The majority of the deals making the news are structured like this; maybe technically those aren't actual ducks[2], but they sure look, walk and talk like ducks.
Similarly structured deals are with Oracle. And Coreweave. And everyone.
It may not be a "circular" deal, but what do you expect people to call it when a company makes a deal to receive cash (not credit, but actual cash) from a vendor, and spends that cash with that vendor?
==========================
[1] I use this word loosely here - the investment is a commitment of 10x $10m tranches.
[2] I.e. circular deals.
jrflowers 6 hours ago [-]
> But this is not circular. Circular would be if I sell you an apple worth $0.25 for $2.00
When you draw a circle on a piece of paper do you put your pencil to the paper, start drawing a curve, stop and write the word FRAUD, and then complete the curve? Or do you just draw a circle?
I’m assuming that people are saying “circular” in that it looks like the money goes in a circle. (For one example) Nvidia invests in Lambda, Lambda buys GPUs from Nvidia, Nvidia leases GPUs back from Lambda, Lambda uses the revenue from leasing the GPUs to Nvidia to raise debt to buy more GPUs from Nvidia…
credit_guy 6 hours ago [-]
This is how financing works. When you buy a house, you get a mortgage from a bank. It is unusual to get a mortgage from a seller. It would feel a bit circular, right? But that is exactly what happens most of the time when people buy a car. They get a loan from the same company that sells them the car. Is that circular?
When you replace people with companies, the financing can become much more complex. The example you provided with Nvidia and Lambda seems quite reasonable to me. Here's an example that happens every day in the world of housing: banks lend money to house buyers. Then they package the mortgages and sell the resulting mortgage back securities. Then they take the money from the proceeds, and give more loans, and package them and create more mortgage back securities. Seems circular, right? But that's just how business is done. There is no Ponzi aspect to this, or fraud, or smoke and mirrors. It's just every day business. Nobody labels that as being circular.
diab0lic 6 hours ago [-]
When people buy a car they sometimes get a loan from the auto manufacturer’s financial services arm. What they don’t usually get are warrants struck at a penny for 10% of the manufacturer.
You sound like you know what you’re talking about. I only think I know what I’m talking about. Help me understand: What am I missing in the OpenAI / AMD deal that makes it non circular?
BobbyTables2 6 hours ago [-]
Everyday business isn’t based on hype.
The AI startup valuation largely is. I feel it quickly becomes circular because people make projections purely on other projections since the world is too impatient to wait and find out.
A single hamburger store is never going to be projected to have a billion dollars of revenue because people understand the total addressable market. Doesn’t matter how good the burger is.
The AI stuff is too new that people don’t have a firm grasp on the costs and profit opportunities. They don’t really even know how to define the TAM. Too many unknowns. Entire classes of labor could be replaced by AI —- or perhaps not.
With little grounding, it quickly becomes a circle of hype.
laserlight 2 hours ago [-]
It's ironic that you described how the 2008 financial crisis came to be to illustrate how “normal” this circularity is.
nl 43 minutes ago [-]
Loans have happened long before 2008 and have continued ever since.
This process is described in the Bible for example!
jrflowers 40 minutes ago [-]
What does the Bible say about collecting interest on loans (the necessary part for making mortgage backed securities)
jrflowers 6 hours ago [-]
I don’t know what to tell you guy, but when people see money moving in a circle in a deal there is a good chance that “circular deal” might pop into their heads. Because it’s a deal that is shaped like a circle.
> Is that circular?
Doesn’t really seem so because at the end of the day the money goes from me to them. I don’t get my money back, I get a car in exchange for my money.
Also this deal didn’t begin with the manufacturer purchasing shares of me before offering me debt to buy a car from them.
>But that is exactly what happens most of the time when people buy a car.
Your car manufacturer leases your car back from you? And you use that revenue to raise debt to buy more cars from them? What manufacturer are you doing this with? What do you end up driving?
4 hours ago [-]
ath3nd 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
stephc_int13 6 hours ago [-]
Every day a new deal involving OpenAI.
Every day one or more article wondering if/when the AI boom will transform into a bursting bubble.
Maybe people are crying wolf or misreading the situation.
My gut feeling is that yes, this is indeed a bubble and behind closed doors the CEOs are in panic mode, weirdly repeating past and well known mistakes
trash_cat 3 hours ago [-]
There is some circular financing going on, but AI accelerationists think this will be offset by demand, value, and adoption in businesses. Hence these deals are warranted for the incoming demand.
thesmtsolver 2 hours ago [-]
What is the economy if not a bunch of much larger overlapping circles of different sizes?
emoII 2 hours ago [-]
And I guess the smaller the cluster, the larger the bubble?
1 hours ago [-]
t0lo 2 hours ago [-]
This incest investing is pretty telling. The whole economy is about to get burned- doubly so with DJTs tariffs and bonds not looking like the safe haven they usually are during turbulent times.
“We’re now locked into a particular version of the market and the future where all roads lead to big tech,” says Amba Kak, co-executive director of the AI Now Institute, which studies AI development and policy. Indeed, the success of major stock indexes—and perhaps your 401(k)—is resting on the continued growth of AI: Meta, Amazon, and the chipmakers Nvidia and Broadcom have accounted for 60 percent of the S&P 500’s returns this year."
bluSCALE4 3 hours ago [-]
Is this the proverbial writing on the wall then?
throw-10-8 2 hours ago [-]
Anyone remember the subprime crisis?
altacc 16 minutes ago [-]
The other day I was helping somebody choose some funds to invest in. The majority of "global" or "index" funds we looked into either directly or indirectly had the largest share of holdings in Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, AMD. Often these were about 50-70% of their portfolio. The returns for the past year look great but the crash is going to be devastating and widespread because so many investments link back to this bubble.
throw-10-8 8 minutes ago [-]
I completely withdrew from the US market last Nov 5th.
It's plainly obvious where all of this is going.
senectus1 2 hours ago [-]
this is going to be bigger, mostly because the leadership vaccume in the US Gov is all too happy for it to get very big before it goes bang.
1vuio0pswjnm7 9 hours ago [-]
"AI companies say these kinds of large, reciprocal, and sometimes overlapping deals are what's needed to meet growing demand for their tech. But as more and more money gets invested in the space these unorthodox business arrangements are also raising flags for industry analysts who are starting to wonder: Is the trillion-dollar AI market being propped up by the industry itself?"
nkrisc 8 hours ago [-]
From the outside: sure looks like. Can’t wait to find out if I’m right or wrong.
chasd00 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah I spoke to my wife a few min ago about these deals and other indicators of a bubble. We’re updating our 401k’s and the old college fund brokerage account in the morning and have agreed to not make any additional changes until Jan 2027. Going to sit out a year and see what happens.
altacc 9 minutes ago [-]
I am for a medium risk profile and I've already started diversifying. A lot of major "global" or "index" tracking funds are now majority comprised of holdings in Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet and also Tesla. I've seen many supposedly non-tech funds where about 50-75% of their portfolio are linked to this bubble. Sometimes the holdings aren't clear if the fund invests in other funds. As an individual investor I won't be able to react fast enough to a crash, so am being proactive with moving investments so that no more than half is exposed. Will obviously keep an eye on things to reduce that if it looks wise.
01100011 4 hours ago [-]
Equities in the US are priced in dollars. If you think the dollar is going to lose value(because the government is led by people who have repeatedly told you this is their goal) then you expect stocks to rise commensurate with the devaluation of the dollar. I am not a bitcoiner or saying the USD is done for, but it seems clear that the dollar is weakened and will continue to weaken and this is a significant risk for folks like me with minimal exposure to stocks and precious metals.
Fade_Dance 6 hours ago [-]
These sorts of outlooks are notoriously hard to predict.
Paul Tudor Jones (one of the most successful investors of our time) is of the mindset that if anything we are about to see equity appreciation far in excess of what we have seen for decades.
If that's the case, right when you're looking to rebalance your portfolio, you're going to be looking at a much more difficult decision, having already missed out on price appreciation that would be quite useful in padding downside risk...
Perhaps just step away from market cap weighted index funds as a long term adjustment. That's something that with a proper basic framework is advisable as a general portfolio management approach as well. (I have some SMLF - Smallcap Quality/Value, Berkshire, generic Global Equity exposure, not for outright returns, but to lower exposure to the concentrated passive market cap weighted indexes and diversify risk exposures).
Trend Following exposure is a great add as well, since it is negatively correlated with risk assets in many macro/market regimes.
Probably healthier to address your very real concern with modifying the long-term portfolio design rather than take a short-term market timing approach which is more of a negative expected value.
repeekad 7 hours ago [-]
If we end up with inflation rather than a market crash, this could be quite costly? Gold is up 50% this year, which hype is more correct than the other?
ItsBob 4 hours ago [-]
If memory serves, it's shit like this that sank Global Crossing: creative accounting, I think it was called at the time.
ra0x3 9 hours ago [-]
Upvote because can someone explain to someone as dense as me, whether or not this is likely to make some likely AI bubble worse? Is this just how industry allocates capital?
N70Phone 6 hours ago [-]
Part of what's concerning here is that the deals are conditional. OpenAI must meet XYZ conditions before cash/stock/etc is transferred, and the conditions are pretty hard to meet.
The money between OpenAI, Nvidia, Oracle, AMD is not circulating. There is no cashflow, only future commitments that may (and quite likely will) collapse. Yet the stock market & media react as if it's a sure thing. Even in the criticisms of these deals, the hype is affirmed.
This is the same problem as Enron's accounting, minus the fraud. (No need for fraudulent accounting when people simply don't read the fine print.)
wmf 7 hours ago [-]
These deals certainly make the bubble look larger because people are double-counting revenue. They also seem to be triggering extreme investor FOMO.
petesergeant 6 hours ago [-]
> They also seem to be triggering extreme investor FOMO.
Bubble's only bad if you get out at the wrong time.
itsn0tm3 2 hours ago [-]
Only for you as an individual, from an economic and societal perspective a bursting bubble is never good!
MangoCoffee 3 hours ago [-]
>AI bubble worse?
Is it worse than the dot-com bubble? I remember everyone and their mom who knew HTML could get hired, and there were way more companies that went IPO during the dot-com bubble, like theglobe.com.
AI is a bubble, but is it worse than the dot-com bubble or the real estate bubble in 2008?
measurablefunc 8 hours ago [-]
The money is allocated by institutional investors. They buy the stock, the companies trade their more valuable stocks amongst themselves for various deals. If institutional investors stop investing then the flow of deals stops & the bubble pops. There is nowhere else the institutional investors could park their money other than tech so I don't think the bubble is going to pop any time soon. But infinite growth is obviously a logical & physical impossibility so eventually there will be a correction but whoever says they know exactly when that will happen is lying & they'd be better off buying lottery tickets to cash in on their ability to predict the future.
sailfast 6 hours ago [-]
Personally think this makes a tech bubble a contagion for other parts of the financial industry - especially if institutional investors take the "easy" trade that everyone is doing and add leverage to it.
Now once these folks don't get 800B per year in revenue and the money runs out, all of the banks go as well. But don't worry - they'll get bailed out with our money...
feverzsj 3 hours ago [-]
Circular trading is a common technique used in Ponzi schemes to create the illusion of trading activity and to attract more investors.
barbarr 8 hours ago [-]
This and stock buybacks make me question company valuations
redwood 8 hours ago [-]
Stock buyback is effectively just a dividend with a different tax implication: reducing the number of shares in circulation raises the ownership stake of the remaining shares
danans 7 hours ago [-]
> Stock buyback is effectively just a dividend with a different tax implication
Not just different, it specifically a lower tax rate assuming that the stockholder has held long enough to use the long term capital gains tax rate (which lower than the dividend tax rate).
danpalmer 6 hours ago [-]
[in the US]
ctkhn 8 hours ago [-]
Stock buyback isn't a total scam as it seems, but it does mean "we can't figure out any productive use case for this cash in advancing R&D or scaling our business anymore" which is still pretty worrying
BobbyTables2 6 hours ago [-]
It’s more like, “the executives with lots of shares can’t see how to make the company grow, so they’ll just use profits to pump up the share price for their gain”.
I deeply feel buybacks shouldn’t be illegal but treated shamefully.
Instead of using profits to build up long term savings or fund R&D, they basically choose to do as little as possible.
There is no vision.
wmf 4 hours ago [-]
Realistically, if the execs think they can't do R&D then they can't. If they tried they would just waste the money.
aoeusnth1 5 hours ago [-]
Should companies never pay dividends?
ljlolel 2 hours ago [-]
Investments into vision can juice the stock price too. So they would do it if they had good realistic inspiring ideas
yen223 6 hours ago [-]
I suppose stock buybacks are similar to dividends in that regard
petesergeant 6 hours ago [-]
By that logic, any profit a company distributes to shareholders is worrying.
throwaway2037 2 hours ago [-]
How are these "circular deals" different than Boeing (and other heavy civilian equipment makers) providing financing on purchases? My point: Is this simply clutching pearls over the AI/LLM bubble, or is there some substance to this concern?
And another: How does it compare against the new breed of Bitcoin treasuries, like Strategy (MSTR.OQ)? As I understand, Strategy uses secondary offerings to continuously see more shares, then uses the capital to buy more Bitcoin.
f1shy 2 hours ago [-]
This happens also with automotive companies. Peugeot has its own bank, which lends money to people buying peugeots. The big difference: is not circular. The bank is a bank, the OEM building cars build cars.
The bank makes money by lending and cashing interest.
The car maker by selling for profit.
The money goes from bank to OEM, and not the way around, no circle.
I do not know the specifics of Boeing though.
6 hours ago [-]
churchill 6 hours ago [-]
On the surface, the circular financing seems worrying but once you dig into it, it seems quite benign, tbh. NVIDIA is handing out GPUs into OpenAI, in return for stock/future revenue, whichever way you want to slice it. OpenAI has wonky unit economics, yes, but they're growing at ~100% YoY, so it all checks out, if you ask me.
fedeb95 23 minutes ago [-]
yes but their growth isn't driven by actual profits. It's a bet.
Fade_Dance 6 hours ago [-]
The part that I think may have some credence is that it may be a way to prop up huge profit margins that may persist for longer than they would otherwise in lieu of further commoditization and competition.
If NVIDIA has a stake in the company, they are less likely to do something like start brewing inference chips in house with the help of the foundry partner and a provider of vanilla chip designs. The company also gets a huge cash injection that is somewhat contingent on not doing that, and hey, they have a fresh pile of cash for cutting edge chips so whatever, right? My first thought was that these deals had more to do with that than anything else.
That aspect may end up being a bit illusory in the end. But then again, Nvidia has been proven to be quite skilled at building out and defending their ecosystem, sometimes through ruthless means, so maybe it persists (and I'm not sure that's a good thing). China certainly isn't a threat to throw a wrench in this situation... the entire US geopolitical complex will ensure that is the case.
sailfast 6 hours ago [-]
The weird part is the _impression_ that $100B is being paid to a hardware company for chips, when in fact zero dollars are being paid to a hardware company and instead they are relying on public markets to spike the stock price based on potential future orders as if the demand is real.
The only reason this works is if we are the useful idiots buying up the stock.
aktuel 3 hours ago [-]
My brain now reads Sam's face as an "AI generated" watermark.
I can't legally define it yet, but I struggle to see how these deals aren't tax evasion, if not outright fraud.
driverdan 6 hours ago [-]
That's not how taxes work. This isn't reddit, not everything is tax evasion.
_heimdall 5 hours ago [-]
OpenAI is spending little to no money on the hardware and AMD can claim both investment expenditure and revenue. I made clear that I'm not sure the intricacies of how that or may not be tax evasion or fraud, though I dotn see how it could be neither.
fijiaarone 6 hours ago [-]
Would profiting from these deals make your struggle a little less difficult?
Rendered at 08:13:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
What's he going to do with all that money, and what does he care for the risk it's bad or shady?
Worst case, he got to be #1 for a bit for a few dozen billion, best case he's hoping AGI will extend his life before he croaks.
The thing that unites Ellison, Trump, Musk, Thiel and a fair few of the other politically active billionaires is the obsession with "legacy" - they want to leave their mark in the history books, figures which will likely be remembered and taught in schools in thousands of years similar to Roman emperors.
Musk is the most obvious with his obsession of settling (and eventually dying) on Mars, Trump is dreaming of getting a Nobel Peace Prize (if only to not let Obama be the only US President who got one), and the rest is hunting for the "invented AGI" crown.
I used it to learn terraform and have a kubernetes cluster running.
I know it's always trendy to bash oracle and simp for AWS, but it is THE best option for learning and hobbyists.
Can you get that without adding a payment mechanism? For some reason, I'd be more cautious about putting my card into Oracle's offering than anyone else.
No!
There are actually two free tiers.
The limited free tier you get without adding a CC and then this advanced "always free" tier I am using, where you have to use and verify a CC and have to pay big bucks if you mess up.
limited free tier: 300$ to be spent in 30 days
advanced always free tier: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...
Learning terraform isn't hard, it's what you stitch together with terraform that is hard.
When the fed investigates this does it matter if one of the 3 companies is not a publicly traded company?
The issue is that it's an industry of investment which exists solely to power more investment in AI - the entire chain is still assuming that someone will eventually pay for this.
At the end of the day all that money leaks out to employees and suppliers...but no one those people transact with may have any interest in buying what was produced.
It's entirely based on the perception that LLM training & inference is here to stay at ever growing scales when the shortcomings of Artificial Dreaming are increasingly scrutinized. Not all businesses want to end up paying refunds to their clients like Deloitte [1] because the LLM hallucinated crap into their reports (and they failed to correct it).
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/06/deloi...
In terms of actual earnings not sure Tesla is doing better.
>By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto Ponzi scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth. So they invested in new Internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in. When I realized this one day, sitting in my cubicle, I jumped up like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of "Eureka!" I was shouting "Sell!"
The real problem seemed to be that you can only put so much money into pets.com before it becomes stupid. You had more short term investment capital than could be _effectively_ spent at the time. The long term players, as usual, avoided the Archimedian idealism, and were heavily rewarded anyways.
pg has startup brains.
Words have meaning in context, and calling something a "Ponzi scheme" these days means any pyramid-like system that only works as long as new investors come to the table, because that new investor money is the sole source of gains for earlier investors. But once you run out of new investors, which is inevitable, the whole thing collapses. What pg described was exactly a Ponzi scheme in that sense, even if it wasn't a deliberate scam. And that's very different from other types of business ventures that eventually fail because of the more "normal" reason that they just don't gain traction.
And you do recognize the context of those words was 15 years ago at this point?
> was exactly a Ponzi scheme in that sense, even if it wasn't a deliberate scam
There are better terms of art to describe the scenario. If we lacked for those words I might grant you this point, but since we don't, I find the description lacking in precision if not completely faulty.
> the more "normal" reason that they just don't gain traction.
Is that actually the "normal reason" most businesses fail? I'm not sure it is.
Strategically I thought OpenAI's deal of getting 10% of AMD for driving their stock price to $600 was a pretty clever way of creating $97 Billion from nothing - effectively paying for the GPUs they'd purchase.
At the same time I would've thought this insider pump and cash-in strategy would be somehow illegal, but I guess anything goes with this administration.
If token usage declines because of high prices, look at what happened to SBF.
> OpenAI: We would like six gigawatts worth of your chips to do inference.
> AMD: Terrific. That will be $78 billion. How would you like to pay?
> OpenAI: Well, we were thinking that we would announce the deal, and that would add $78 billion to the value of your company, which should cover it.
> AMD: …
> OpenAI: …
> AMD: No I’m pretty sure you have to pay for the chips.
> OpenAI: Why?
> AMD: I dunno, just seems wrong not to.
> OpenAI: Okay. Why don’t we pay you cash for the value of the chips, and you give us back stock, and when we announce the deal the stock will go up and we’ll get our $78 billion back.
> AMD: Yeah I guess that works though I feel like we should get some of the value?
> OpenAI: Okay you can have half. You give us stock worth like $35 billion and you keep the rest.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-10-06/ope...
https://archive.is/tS5sy
OpenAI is good at deals - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45493815 (40 comments)
> AMD: Oh, since you put it like that, why don't you pay us $x for the chips and give us $ 0.5 x worth of stock? When your market cap rises by $ 0.5 x you'll get the money for those stocks. And hell, it might even rise further, giving you back some of the money for those chips. You're really robbing me blind with this deal, you'd be a fool not to take it!
Matt's telling is a little facetious, so the exact negotiation probably didn't go like that. More importantly, OpenAI has better options. If they want to pay AMD cash for chips, they could do that without also giving up their equity. The same can't be said for AMD. They're the second choice when it comes to GPUs, and they're desperate for market share, so they're willing to cut deals like this. Without this deal OpenAI probably would have bought Nvidia chips with cash.
> NVIDIA intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI progressively as each gigawatt is deployed.
Now we are just transferring the power from bankers -> tech/AI.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL#2000%E2%80%932008:_As_AOL_...
From the OpenAI side, it’s an amazing deal. $35B profit in one day… at a pe of 30, it’s already worth a trillion if it can repeat similar deals every year.
2000s: cloud bubble 2010s: crypto bubble 2020s: AI bubble
Seems modern economy works different. I missed cloud and crypto and dont wana miss AI so im investing about 20% of my income.
But "circular deals" has such a nice ring to it, that you hear it everywhere nowadays. People are just hungry for negative soundbites.
A stronger counterpoint to the circular deals suggestion is at the end of the article, which reads
> Michael Intrator, CoreWeave’s CEO, acknowledged the circular financing worries in a recent interview with Bloomberg News, but said the public concerns will dissipate as more businesses adopt AI.
> “When Microsoft comes to us to buy infrastructure to deliver to its clients who are consuming 365 or Copilot, I don't care what the narrative is about circular financing,” Intrator said. “They have end users that are consuming it.”
It's on you to decide then if end users are actually getting value / paying for AI products.
they're not
https://www.perspectives.plus/p/microsoft-365-copilot-commer...
What credibility does this guy have? Sounds like someone that has an axe to grind.
https://niiranenadvisory.com/about
OpenAI => nVidia => OpenAI. That's pretty circular.
They've discovered a cheat code IMO. Instead of using and raising money themselves, use their reputation/popularity and use their suppliers market caps (e.g. NVIDIA, AMD, etc). The deal makes sense as long as the value projected to be added (i.e. via efficiency gains, loss of jobs, changing society, etc) exceeds the capital dilution for the supplier; they use their equity but the leftover equity value increase makes up for it.
Given all the passive investing, and funds invested in the top tech companies this is a VERY large pool of capital. It however increases leverage if the value doesn't materialise.
This distinction is important to me because I see more concrete evidence for a possible material drop in NVIDIA's business short- to medium-term than a collapse of the sector as a whole. The chips act clearly shut them out unexpectedly from their second largest market and now it seems likely that Chinese chips will be competitive for training sooner than expected. Indeed, if Chinese AI firms are suddenly able to obtain even a roughly approximate product at considerably less cost, OpenAI will suddenly find themselves at a cost if not compute disadvantage to their Eastern competitors. It isn't a surprise, then, that OpenAI is now looking to reduce their present vendor lock-in with NVIDIA.
Overall, it's not great for the latter if they lose access to their second largest market, suddenly have viable competitors in their home market, and either lose some of a major client's business or have to significantly reduce pricing to retain it.
But this is not circular. Circular would be if I sell you an apple worth $0.25 for $2.00, and then you sell it back to me for $2.00, or other similar amount, and I get to mark all the apples in my inventory at $2.00 and show a huge profit (on paper). One can create variations of this blatant deal. Like I sell you some rubber for 10 times the market price, you make a balloon and then I buy the balloon for 10 times the market price. I may not have other balloons in my inventory, but plenty of rubber, and I show some nice profit. One can imagine other, fancier deals.
But in the case of AMD and NVidia, and OpenAI and Oracle, the direction is clear. OpenAI has a clear need for compute. They can buy it directly from NVidia and AMD, or indirectly from Oracle. They can buy it with hard cash (of which they don't have that much), or with their own equity, or some form of deal that offers the seller an upside in OpenAI's equity.
But there is not back and forth buying of the same item, or of rubber/balloons. All the deals seem legit. Is it possible that all the future compute will not be needed, because the AI craze will fizzle. It is, lots of things are possible. But that's general business risk.
Some, certainly, but the vendor-financing deals certainly look circular to the casual observer. Microsoft invests $X into OpenAI for a 51% (or whatever) stake, and that investment then goes straight back to Microsoft to pay for compute credits.
Or Nvidia invests[1] $100m into OpenAI, which OpenAI then turns around and pays back to Nvidia for compute.
The majority of the deals making the news are structured like this; maybe technically those aren't actual ducks[2], but they sure look, walk and talk like ducks.
Similarly structured deals are with Oracle. And Coreweave. And everyone.
It may not be a "circular" deal, but what do you expect people to call it when a company makes a deal to receive cash (not credit, but actual cash) from a vendor, and spends that cash with that vendor?
==========================
[1] I use this word loosely here - the investment is a commitment of 10x $10m tranches.
[2] I.e. circular deals.
When you draw a circle on a piece of paper do you put your pencil to the paper, start drawing a curve, stop and write the word FRAUD, and then complete the curve? Or do you just draw a circle?
I’m assuming that people are saying “circular” in that it looks like the money goes in a circle. (For one example) Nvidia invests in Lambda, Lambda buys GPUs from Nvidia, Nvidia leases GPUs back from Lambda, Lambda uses the revenue from leasing the GPUs to Nvidia to raise debt to buy more GPUs from Nvidia…
When you replace people with companies, the financing can become much more complex. The example you provided with Nvidia and Lambda seems quite reasonable to me. Here's an example that happens every day in the world of housing: banks lend money to house buyers. Then they package the mortgages and sell the resulting mortgage back securities. Then they take the money from the proceeds, and give more loans, and package them and create more mortgage back securities. Seems circular, right? But that's just how business is done. There is no Ponzi aspect to this, or fraud, or smoke and mirrors. It's just every day business. Nobody labels that as being circular.
You sound like you know what you’re talking about. I only think I know what I’m talking about. Help me understand: What am I missing in the OpenAI / AMD deal that makes it non circular?
The AI startup valuation largely is. I feel it quickly becomes circular because people make projections purely on other projections since the world is too impatient to wait and find out.
A single hamburger store is never going to be projected to have a billion dollars of revenue because people understand the total addressable market. Doesn’t matter how good the burger is.
The AI stuff is too new that people don’t have a firm grasp on the costs and profit opportunities. They don’t really even know how to define the TAM. Too many unknowns. Entire classes of labor could be replaced by AI —- or perhaps not.
With little grounding, it quickly becomes a circle of hype.
This process is described in the Bible for example!
> Is that circular?
Doesn’t really seem so because at the end of the day the money goes from me to them. I don’t get my money back, I get a car in exchange for my money.
Also this deal didn’t begin with the manufacturer purchasing shares of me before offering me debt to buy a car from them.
>But that is exactly what happens most of the time when people buy a car.
Your car manufacturer leases your car back from you? And you use that revenue to raise debt to buy more cars from them? What manufacturer are you doing this with? What do you end up driving?
Every day one or more article wondering if/when the AI boom will transform into a bursting bubble.
Maybe people are crying wolf or misreading the situation.
My gut feeling is that yes, this is indeed a bubble and behind closed doors the CEOs are in panic mode, weirdly repeating past and well known mistakes
“We’re now locked into a particular version of the market and the future where all roads lead to big tech,” says Amba Kak, co-executive director of the AI Now Institute, which studies AI development and policy. Indeed, the success of major stock indexes—and perhaps your 401(k)—is resting on the continued growth of AI: Meta, Amazon, and the chipmakers Nvidia and Broadcom have accounted for 60 percent of the S&P 500’s returns this year."
It's plainly obvious where all of this is going.
Paul Tudor Jones (one of the most successful investors of our time) is of the mindset that if anything we are about to see equity appreciation far in excess of what we have seen for decades.
https://fortune.com/2025/10/07/paul-tudor-jones-hedge-fund-b...
If that's the case, right when you're looking to rebalance your portfolio, you're going to be looking at a much more difficult decision, having already missed out on price appreciation that would be quite useful in padding downside risk...
Perhaps just step away from market cap weighted index funds as a long term adjustment. That's something that with a proper basic framework is advisable as a general portfolio management approach as well. (I have some SMLF - Smallcap Quality/Value, Berkshire, generic Global Equity exposure, not for outright returns, but to lower exposure to the concentrated passive market cap weighted indexes and diversify risk exposures).
Trend Following exposure is a great add as well, since it is negatively correlated with risk assets in many macro/market regimes.
Probably healthier to address your very real concern with modifying the long-term portfolio design rather than take a short-term market timing approach which is more of a negative expected value.
The money between OpenAI, Nvidia, Oracle, AMD is not circulating. There is no cashflow, only future commitments that may (and quite likely will) collapse. Yet the stock market & media react as if it's a sure thing. Even in the criticisms of these deals, the hype is affirmed.
This is the same problem as Enron's accounting, minus the fraud. (No need for fraudulent accounting when people simply don't read the fine print.)
Bubble's only bad if you get out at the wrong time.
Is it worse than the dot-com bubble? I remember everyone and their mom who knew HTML could get hired, and there were way more companies that went IPO during the dot-com bubble, like theglobe.com.
AI is a bubble, but is it worse than the dot-com bubble or the real estate bubble in 2008?
Now once these folks don't get 800B per year in revenue and the money runs out, all of the banks go as well. But don't worry - they'll get bailed out with our money...
Not just different, it specifically a lower tax rate assuming that the stockholder has held long enough to use the long term capital gains tax rate (which lower than the dividend tax rate).
I deeply feel buybacks shouldn’t be illegal but treated shamefully.
Instead of using profits to build up long term savings or fund R&D, they basically choose to do as little as possible.
There is no vision.
And another: How does it compare against the new breed of Bitcoin treasuries, like Strategy (MSTR.OQ)? As I understand, Strategy uses secondary offerings to continuously see more shares, then uses the capital to buy more Bitcoin.
The bank makes money by lending and cashing interest.
The car maker by selling for profit.
The money goes from bank to OEM, and not the way around, no circle.
I do not know the specifics of Boeing though.
If NVIDIA has a stake in the company, they are less likely to do something like start brewing inference chips in house with the help of the foundry partner and a provider of vanilla chip designs. The company also gets a huge cash injection that is somewhat contingent on not doing that, and hey, they have a fresh pile of cash for cutting edge chips so whatever, right? My first thought was that these deals had more to do with that than anything else.
That aspect may end up being a bit illusory in the end. But then again, Nvidia has been proven to be quite skilled at building out and defending their ecosystem, sometimes through ruthless means, so maybe it persists (and I'm not sure that's a good thing). China certainly isn't a threat to throw a wrench in this situation... the entire US geopolitical complex will ensure that is the case.
The only reason this works is if we are the useful idiots buying up the stock.
Welcome to the casino! Please enjoy your stay, and remember: the house always wins ;)
my money is on 18 months