What Happens When the AI Boom Runs Out of Money

Ben Thompson joins Patrick O’Shaughnessy on Invest Like The Best to ask whether the money runs out before the returns arrive. He reads the buildout through the railroads of the 1870s and the logic of commodity markets: shipping, memory, and TSMC all show what happens when everyone invests at the moment of scarcity and the capacity lands years later. Along the way he argues that a decisive US win in AI would be dangerous for the world, that consumers never pay for software so OpenAI should have gone to advertising on day one, that Microsoft is replaying IBM’s middleware playbook, and that Nvidia’s backstop deals are price cuts in disguise. The lasting payoff of this bubble, he suggests, may be energy abundance.