Monologue: Amazon Is Warehousing Billions In GPUs

In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron walks you through how Amazon is warehousing billions of dollars of GPUs, and how NVIDIA created an artificial supply chain crisis by forcing hyperscalers to take early delivery of its AI chips. Business Insider: Amazon is buying billions in Nvidia AI systems it can't yet turn on https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-nvidia-ai-gpu-data-centers-power-shortages-2026-10?utm_campaign=business-link-post&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter Newsletter: AI Had Better Work Out https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-had-better-work-out/ Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1 YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Running a small business takes everything you've got. But with Chase for Business, you're not alone. They bring together local support and a broad range of resources to more than 7 million customers. With a deep understanding of your day to day needs, they provide products and guidance built to help you thrive. Right now, earn $500 when you open a new Chase Business Complete Checking account for new business checking customers with qualifying activities. Offer expires January 21, 2027. Chase Business Complete Checking has the flexible tools you need to accept payments, make deposits, and manage your finances with confidence. Learn more at chase.com/podcastbizoffer. Chase, make more of what's yours.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Fees may apply to Chase Business Complete Checking accounts. The $500 offer is available for new business checking accounts with qualifying activities through January 21, 2027. Eligibility and qualification requirements must be met. Additional restrictions may apply. Please speak with a business banker for more information. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., Member FDIC.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  Empower is all about helping you invest well, so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals, and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends, or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money, and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com, not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

• 1:43Speaker 03

  This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem? Running a business is hard enough. Don't make it harder with a dozen apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. That's software overload. Odoo is the all-in-one platform that replaces them all. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR. Fully integrated, easy to use, and built to grow with your business. Thousands have already made the switch. Why not you? Try Odoo for free at O D O O dot com. That's Odoo dot com.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  This is Oz Voloshin from Tech Stuff. For many kids and teens, math class is a source of stress. And a lot of that stress comes from learning at the wrong pace. That's why I want to tell you about Brilliant. Brilliant is the online math tutor that's visual and interactive. It helps students actually understand math step by step and gives them guidance when they need it. Brilliant was built by experts from MIT and Harvard and is trusted by millions of teachers and parents. Sign up at brilliant.org/tutor and get 20% off for back to school. That's brilliant.org/tutor.

• 2:55Speaker 04

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of 5-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 3:26Speaker 05

  Call Zone Media.

• 3:28Speaker 06

  Greetings, salutations, and hello. I'm Ed Zitron, and this is this week's Better Offline Monologue.

• 3:42Speaker 06

  Congratulations to Eugene Kim of Business Insider for getting one of the biggest scoops of the AI bubble. Confirming my estimate that billions of dollars of Nvidia GPUs were being warehoused in an incredible story about Amazon's early rack receipt program. According to BI, some Amazon Web Services data center sites had room for more racks, but not enough available power to turn them on, leaving the equipment to be staged at intermediary warehouses until the facilities were ready. BI adds that Amazon used to not have to pay for those racks until the gear was put into the data center, but that, and I quote, "the intensity of the AI data center building boom has made this type of coordination harder, with Amazon having to compete more for scarce resources

• 4:24Speaker 06

  as it jockeys with rivals for access to Nvidia GPUs and other AI components." Very strange for one of the largest buyers of GPUs to be talking about scarcity of an object that it has so much of that it can't install all of them. And that's because what appears to be happening is that Nvidia, who previously did not charge customers until they actually needed its GPUs, is now forcing them to take early receipt and pay them, despite the customers in question not actually being able to use said GPUs. Now, I know that there are going to be some people who hear this and say, "Oh, that's very common. Oh, they get them in advance anyway. Oh, that's totally normal." It's not normal.

• 5:05Speaker 06

  It's not normal at all, and anyone acting that way is a bootlicker, as I'll get to later, because from what I can tell, it appears that Nvidia is channel stuffing, when a company forces inventory onto its customers prematurely as a means of boosting revenues. Usually, this is done by offering deep discounts in exchange, but in this case, Jensen Huang is using the desperation of hyperscalers against them. And while I'm guessing, I believe that he's saying that if you don't buy them in advance, the GPUs won't be available when you finish the data center, even if that's three to six to 12 months in the future. And this is not the first time we've heard stories like this. There was a story in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago from, I think, Robbie Whelan and Catherine Blunt, that said that NeoClouds, the core weaves of the world, that bought AMD GPUs or other competing GPUs

• 5:50Speaker 06

  will be put in something called Jensen jail, which is where all the Nvidia fans wish they could be put with a dog collar around their throat, but also refers to this thing of if you piss off Jensen Huang, you don't get your GPUs. The distance between delivery and installation is so severe. The Business Insider found an email where an engineer said that they saw "no clear forecasted path to install an indeterminately sized order of GPUs", and another saying that Amazon will be taking delivery of $3 billion worth of GPUs every month for the foreseeable future. Now, some will dispute my accusation of channel stuffing, suggesting that hyperscalers are the ones making the early purchases for planning reasons.

• 6:34Speaker 06

  But that, that just doesn't make sense to me. And the phrase "compete more for scarce resources" is the tell. Riddle me this, Batman. If Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, and many other companies do not have the power to plug in the chips or the data centers aren't being built, why are the GPUs scarce? What's making them scarce? If companies cannot install the chips, or, put another way, don't need them yet, what is creating the scarcity, other than something that Nvidia itself is demanding of its partners? And by the way, what really fucking turns my stomach about all of this is that it means that the increased price of RAM and consumer electronics

• 7:18Speaker 06

  was a result of an artificial supply chain crisis created by Jensen Huang, pushing Nvidia's customers to take early delivery of GPUs. And that means building all of these bloody things months in advance of when he needed them, which in turn meant buying out capacity from Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung, and buying hard drives, and buying all the things for the servers months, if not years in advance, all to increase revenue growth for Nvidia. Jensen Huang is responsible for making life worse for everyone. He is a greedy, joyless, soulless oaf of a man, and doing this required him to be a certain kind of low that no money or status or fucking leather jacket can ever fix.

• 8:02Speaker 06

  Jensen Huang is a piece of shit. Fuck Jensen Huang. Fuck every hyperscaler CEO too. These scumbags drove up the price of everything so that they could all help Jensen Huang with his no IT loads refused party and make everyone more money in theory, but really just make Jensen more money and make maybe the RAM companies as well. We did not need him to build all these GPUs. He just wanted to sell them to boost earnings for the beaten raise machine. Everyone who participated in the early shipments of GPUs is a fucking scumbag. And I know that someone's going to say, "Well, there's good reason to get them early." No, there's not. There really isn't. I get a month early. I get just beforehand.

• 8:46Speaker 06

  But if you know this shit isn't turning on for three to six months, fuck you. And I also want to say something to all of the freaks out there who are defensive of these companies and think that any emotion or disgust towards them is an overreaction. You're a pathetic bootlicker and a bitch, and you have the mindset of a peasant. You want to kiss Jensen Huang's asshole. You want Jensen Huang to be your father and your boyfriend. You love him. You love capitalism, and you love GPUs. You want to fuck one of them. I know I sound all right. Fuck you. I'm sick of this. I'm sick of having to treat these companies without contempt, to be professional about it. Everything is more expensive now. Everything is worse because of what these people did. And people expect me, and the fact that people can actually in the round

• 9:30Speaker 06

  not act with this level of anger genuinely shocks me. These have global consequences. Unless, of course, you're just someone that loves the market, you want to kiss the NASDAQ, you want to fuck the New York Stock Exchange. Maybe you're one of those people and the market's all that matters. You're pathetic to me. You're subhuman. If all you care about is the market, if you don't see the effect on real people as a problem, you're just pathetic. And what these people have done is morally reprehensible, on top of the already vast damage done by the very existence of generative AI. This destructive, pointless void of an industry has made everything it touches worse, all to prop up the vague dreams and excesses of the wealthiest, the most powerful, and utterly fucking dull pieces of shit I've ever had the misfortune of witnessing.

• 10:15Speaker 06

  Everything is more annoying, more expensive, and worse on some level because of generative AI, down to the price of fucking US Treasuries. And everyone who aided in the ascent of generative AI should know that they have profited off of making the world worse. As I wrote in this newsletter this week, I believe a divide has emerged that is much, much larger than data centers. Everyone's gonna, there's gonna be some questions people are gonna have to answer. How into AI were you? How defensive of the industry were you? Were you normal about LLMs? Did you talk about the most useful software that you used for something that perhaps you were encoding? Or did you act strangely defensive of them? Did you constantly talk about them nonstop? Did you attack people who weren't sufficiently excited?

• 11:01Speaker 06

  If you, if you did that, why did you do that? How gullible were you about the financial or technical promises of AI? How many times did you publish an analyzed run rate from Anthropic or OpenAI? How many times did your story directly or by proxy defend these companies doing unethical things? How many times did you hand wave away the financial or social or socio-economic problems? How defensive were you of capital? And how not defensive were you of regular people and the lives of regular people? Because I personally find it morally objectionable to have helped elevate this industry. And now we know that the pre-sales of GPUs, which ran up the price of basically every consumer electronic,

• 11:43Speaker 06

  is a direct result of only stock market growth and of only quarterly revenue growth. I think everyone involved should feel fucking ashamed of themselves. And yet still, modern journalism keeps chugging along, nothing wrong, no problem, put the story in the bag. AI is so big, AI is so huge.

• 12:00Speaker 06

  In any case, the answers to these questions will likely be quite illuminating about the people we meet in the next few years. I don't know when this explodes, you will know that. But I know it will now. I'm sitting here watching another day of blood on CoreWeave stock. Because everything ultimately comes down to the value of the stocks. Because it's not like we know the AI revenues of the hyperscalers. It's not like we know how many GPUs are actually in operation. It's not like really anyone outside of Eugene Kim, respect Eugene, has really gone to the mat to try and find out whether these things are being warehoused. But now we know. We know that everyone's life got made worse pretty much just to help Nvidia.

• 12:40Speaker 06

  And the apes and hogs oinking online and beating their chest over every quarterly earnings with Nvidia. I think I'm gonna enjoy the first one of those that doesn't go well. And not because I wish harm on anyone. But because I can't wait to see the bootlickers eat shit. I'm just fucking sick of it. And people might say I'm overly emotional, people might say I'm taking this too seriously. But I take hundreds of billions of people's lives being made worse pretty much to help a coterie of GPU sellers feel better about themselves and beat earnings. I find that disgusting. I'm not going to pull my punches and I'm not going to pretend it doesn't bother me. And if it doesn't bother you, I'm not sure what you fucking care about.

• 13:24Speaker 06

  But it's clearly not other people. And this is what the show is gonna look and sound like. So buckle up. It's gonna be fun. And even if LLMs somehow survive in some sort of open source form, I think the AI industry as it exists today is being held together through cultism and private equity excess and is rigged to blow and it is going to explode. And the world will be different afterwards and it's going to be difficult. But I think it will be better. And the way we can all make it better is once it explodes, making it clear to those who overly defended the industry, who chose Jensen Wong over their fellow man. It's gonna be hard to treat those people particularly seriously.

• 14:07Speaker 06

  And as you well know, I've been taking very, very detailed notes. I'll be back next week. I hope you've enjoyed listening. I love you all.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Empower is all about helping you invest well so you can go out and live a little. And their free Empower personal dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals and more. Whether you're saving for something big, wanna treat yourself, friends or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower personal dashboard or visit empower.com, not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  This is Oz Voloshin from Tech Stuff. For many kids and teens, math class is a source of stress. And a lot of that stress comes from learning at the wrong pace. That's why I want to tell you about Brilliant. Brilliant is the online math tutor that's visual and interactive. It helps students actually understand math step by step and gives them guidance when they need it. Brilliant was built by experts from MIT and Harvard and is trusted by millions of teachers and parents. Sign up at brilliant.org/tutor and get 20% off for back to school. That's brilliant.org/tutor.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Small businesses are the pulse of every community. They bring people together, create opportunities and drive growth. That's why Chase for Business helps small business owners like you by offering personalized guidance and digital tools that can help your business grow. With our guidance and your determination, you can take your business farther and help build a brighter future for your community. Learn more at chase.com/business. Chase for Business, make more of what's yours. The Chase mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. JP Morgan Chase Bank, N.A., member FDIC. Copyright 2026 JP Morgan Chase and Company. We know kids don't hold back and I wouldn't want them to. Get in there, make a mess, slide for home, bring on the stains. I've got OxiClean versatile stain remover.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  It works on over 100 stains and it's America's number one stain fighter additive brand. It's color safe and chlorine free. So I use it on whites, colors and dark fabrics. And OxiClean isn't just for laundry. Mix it with water for use all around the house, kitchens, bathrooms and even floors. When my kids go all in, I say go for it because I've got OxiClean to get the stains out. It's not clean unless it's OxiClean.

• 16:36Speaker 07

  With LPL Financial, we provide the services to help push you forward. When it comes to your finances, your business, your future, the only question should be, what if you could? Paid advertisement. Anna Kendrick is not a client of LPL Financial LLC and receives compensation to promote LPL. Investing involves risk, including potential loss to principal LPL Financial LLC member FINRA, SIPC.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.