The AI trade is not a bubble. It is three bubbles wearing a coat.
Infrastructure, applications, and narrative are inflating on different clocks. Do not confuse them.
The compute is the company now. Everything else is narration.
Valuations, hiring, even strategy — read them as a function of who controls the GPUs.
Photograph: tek54
Strip away the mission statements and the org charts and you are left with a single question that explains almost everything about a modern AI company: how much compute does it control, and on what terms?
Everything downstream of the cluster is, at best, narration.
Once you start reading the industry this way, the contradictions resolve. The partnerships, the circular investments, the sudden pivots — they are all about securing the next tranche of chips.
