Prices fall 80%, and the money side starts to wobble
Follow-up to Sunday Oct 25: Apollo sees no AI payoff outside tech yetYesterday we looked at Apollo's note saying AI shows no payoff outside tech. TechCrunch picked it up this weekend with a strong quote: 'zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech.' Now there are new signals. A popular post asks why OpenAI and Anthropic cut some prices by up to 80% within a few months. It got 313 points and 309 comments on Hacker News.
On the money side, memory maker Solidigm pulled its IPO this week, according to a Reddit post. The same post says borrowing costs for 'neoclouds' (companies that rent AI chips) are rising while their stocks fall. It notes that Nvidia now helps finance parts of the AI buildout. A headline also says Nvidia's Jensen Huang shared a figure of $2,000 per GPU per year in software revenue.
And still, the big bets continue: SoftBank plans a $50 billion AI and data center outlay in Malaysia. The big cloud companies report earnings in the coming days. That will be the next test.
Cheap AI is good for users and small businesses. But price cuts, pulled IPOs and costly debt together can mean a fight for survival, and companies in a hurry cut corners on safety.
