Hardware

Oh yeah, they are def doing that. I think this theory answers the question of why they're doing what they're doing. Why they piled up money in various tire fires since the Great Recession, the latest one being AI. And if the ROI doesn't show signs that there's ungodly money to be made in AI, the money would move elsewhere, by selling off AI assets, thus crashing AI asset prices (NVIDIA stock, OpenAI valuations, etc.) Once that occurs, if it occurs, is where my hypothesis begins. I'm basically saying that there isn't an obvious thing for them to throw money at, at similar rate they're throwing it to AI. If there's nowehere for them to throw money at as they take it out of AI. Nothing will grow until they find something new, since we know the rest of the economy isn't growing.

BTW, perhaps less obviously, if AI actually shows it would return the huge ROI the market is expecting, I really don't see how that ROI actually going to materialize. At first there will be high returns as firms displace workers with AI, partially (more work per worker, layoff some) or fully. But as more and more firms do this, I highly doubt the economy would be able to quickly find jobs of equivalent pay for all those laid off workers. That means rising unemployment and/or deskilling/downward mobility/lower pay. Which means lower aggregate demand. Which means at one point there won't be enough demand to buy the output of the firms displacing workers with AI. At that point they won't be able to get further returns on their AI investment. That would also likely produce an economic crisis and social unrest as it has in the past.