(Preview) Nvidia’s Answer to Capital Constraints, Google’s Attrition and Direction, Q&A on AI Writing, Vision Pro, Vibe Coding

**Andrew Sharp** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech.
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp, and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how are you doing?

**Ben Thompson** (0:20)
I'm doing okay, Andrew. I kind of feel a little bit in a funk, you know.
There's been some travel going on, it's kind of dreary outside, the brewers are terrible. I'm trying to figure out what is causing what, but a little, it's okay, we're here.

**Andrew Sharp** (0:33)
But here we go.

**Ben Thompson** (0:34)
We'll make it happen. That's right.

**Andrew Sharp** (0:35)
You know what I feel? I feel FOMO because we were together in Wisconsin last week, and I feel like we could have put a call in to Mark Walter to see whether he was interested in selling the Lakers.
Sounded like an asset he needed to move pretty quickly. Maybe we would have gotten lucky, could have beaten Kushner to the punch. Alas, here we are, humble podcasters once again.

**Ben Thompson** (0:59)
Yeah, not to dive into a totally random aside, but Josh Kushner, not Jared, Josh Kushner is now one of the owners of the Los Angeles Lakers. Thrive Capital is in a lot of, they're kind of on the cutting edge, like the new generation of VC companies are doing very well for themselves. I do think their largest holding is OpenAI. So maybe the real bubble concern now is, will anything happen to the Los Angeles Lakers if everything goes sideways?
We'll have to keep an eye on it.

**Andrew Sharp** (1:28)
God willing, that would be one benefit of the bubble bursting. So let's see what happens.
For now, Ben, we're going to do all mail on this episode. And I'll tell you why, because the last two episodes we've recorded, we've gotten so deep into various conversations that we've hit hardly any mail. So we'll try to remedy that today. And we'll start with an article you wrote this week.

**Ben Thompson** (1:52)
I need to not monologue so much.

**Andrew Sharp** (1:54)
That's right, be on your P's and Q's.

**Ben Thompson** (1:56)
Hit as many of these questions as we can.

**Andrew Sharp** (1:59)
We'll see.
Nvidia announced partnerships this week with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR, a super team, to establish an independent financing platform or independent financing platforms designed to mobilize over $500 billion of third party capital to support the build out of AI infrastructure over time. That's Nvidia's announcement. Part of that plan, as I understand it, involves shifting GPU depreciation risk away from traditional lenders in a bit of innovative financial engineering that I hope you can explain for me, because I'm still a little confused what the plan is there.

**Ben Thompson** (2:41)
This is American greatness at play.
We can invent very expensive things to spend money on and invent incredibly convoluted ways to pay for it. Sure.

**Andrew Sharp** (2:51)
Great.
God bless America. So, Andrew, in response to the article you wrote about this on Tuesday, this is a different Andrew. Although, look, this Andrew also has lots of questions about what this actually entails. Andrew asks, can CUDA really generate earnings growth at a rate that outpaces depreciation of the GPUs? I'm being very unscientific about this, but it feels to me like there's an order of magnitude difference in there and not in CUDA's favor. The conclusion of your article on Tuesday carries echoes for me of the re-securitization of mortgage instruments into CDOs and credit default swaps that created the conditions for the subprime loans crisis and the global financial crisis. Do you see any parallels? In seeking to expand the breadth of available capital, is Wang creating the preconditions for a subsequent cascading collapse? Perhaps more interestingly, is there a feasible alternative? Or is this just the way the bubble expands?
So what do you think, Ben? Take it whatever direction you prefer.

**Ben Thompson** (4:00)
Well, let me take it whatever direction I prefer. We may look up an hour later in the talk about the park door building.
There's like a macro question about sort of AI infrastructure generally. And then there's like a micro question about Nvidia specifically. And both are at play, and I think sort of what happened this week. So at a very high level, and this is where people do reach for the railroad analogy. I sort of reluctantly linked to it. It is such a good analogy this week, but just because like everyone's sort of talking about it. So I had to sort of say, look, even though I didn't know about this stuff on this call, I've not had anything special here. Everyone's reading the same book.