VC

GarfieldLeZanya-

Tldr and missing a lot of nuance:  Historically, the only companies you could invest in are publicly traded companies who have to be SEC-vetted and thoroughly and publicly underwritten by third parties. It has its gaps, but the guardrails exist.  For non-public companies, typically the only people who could were accredited private equity and venture capital firms who raised rounds of capital during raise rounds, which are the things you hear about called Seed Rounds, Series A, B, C, etc. These private investments are **not** regulated by the SEC at all, nor do these companies have to publicly disclose as much to any information to the public. It is a low-transparency, low-liquidity market which, unlike the public market, has a **significant** chance of stocks going to $0 and companies outright failing. Thr usual VC rule of thumb is maybe 1 in 20 of their investments generate any profit.  And this has only gotten worse. The private equity industry has become extremely illiquid and valuations are down across the boar, and these firms are stuck holding the bags   Now, that's changed. Now these firms can freely sell these private positions to you and me, and, worse, they can sell it to you in your 401k. Without any public regulation or vetting. Every dumbshit startup spiraling the drain will be pumped into peoples retirement funds and drive peoples 401k's to $0 while rich VCs get to unload their bags. 

RoyalCities

The “compare launch MSRP vs launch rental rate” lens is useful, but it’s only part of the story. I'm looking at today’s economics. I.e. what people actually paid for H100/A100 hardware vs what they can rent it out for now . See my other comments where I did the math using today's rates. If older GPUs naturally drift cheaper as H200/Blackwell arrive that’s fine ONLY if the owner has largely paid down the original capex. The problem is a lot of this gear was bought in the last 1-3 years at peak pricing during the VC spending spree via these providers. When rental rates get pushed down toward or below full cycle breakeven while the loans are still outstanding, the age doesn’t save you. it just means you’re servicing yesterday’s gear / capex with today’s compressed cash. In that sense falling H100/A100 rental prices are a red flag. They show current supply/demand and ROI pressure on recent purchases, not just a normal generational price. And it’s not like most of this gear was bought for cash. Look at the public disclosures from the AI infra players we CAN see. CoreWeave has raised well over $10B in secured debt facilities for GPUs and data centers, and Oracle AI build‑out is explicitly tied to a debt load north of $100B. That’s before even getting into Nvidia‑linked financing and co‑signed deals. This isn’t a clean, pay as you go upgrade cycle. It's a lot of leverage that only works if rental economics hold up...which right now they don't seem to be at all. It looks more like scalp demand padding Nvidia’s books than durable, self funding infrastructure...and that can only run so long before the financing and ROI math collide and investors get wise to all of this.

moorhound

I don't think a lot of people understand how similar the current Silicon Valley/VC sphere is to pre-collapse Rome/Greece It's a bunch of wealthborn yuppies taking drugs and regurgitating contemporary philosophy at each other at orgy parties and then barking orders down to their employee peons during the business week

Some-Palpitation-314

If anything, we're about to see who's been swimming naked when the energy bill comes due. Data centers don't run on vibes and VC money forever.

Beautiful-Parsley-24

I was a founding engineer at a tech startup that went public. One of the VC firms that invested in our startup's Series A gave us the opportunity to invest with them. A bunch of my former colleagues and I took them up on it. I do think this is one of those cases where the standard r/investing advice against active investing fails - I believe we can vet "AI" startups better than the market. We can advise the GP "Well that's bullshit" or "we should write these folks a check".

jaajaajaa6

The one main difference is that the current companies have far more revenue and deeper pockets. In addition, they all act like VC funds and that allows them to constantly evolve and grow. That said, there will always be opportunities outside of the Mag 7.

Happy_Discussion_536

>bankers and VC firms who all took out billions upon billions of cheap debt leveraged against their own wealth capitol. Do you have a source on #s and how it compares to VC leverage today? >We saw the beginning of the liquidity issues just before Thanksgiving. The only evidence I've seen is some use of the standing repo facility and modest use of the discount window. Very small jumps in SOFR. What I mean by crash is something that would take us into a bonafide recession (due to credit seizing up) without intervention soon had Fed not injected with RPM. Is that what you mean?

orangeyougladiator

Well I didn’t mean you and I getting loans. I meant the bankers and VC firms who all took out billions upon billions of cheap debt leveraged against their own wealth capitol. We saw the beginning of the liquidity issues just before Thanksgiving. If you define that as a crash then yes, it would crash.

Chuckles77459

Insider Transactions (Last 6 Months) Data as of December 2025 This is the most telling signal. While the CEO is buying, the Directors are selling. The Only Notable Buyer: The Captain • Jonah Peretti (CEO): • Action: BOUGHT shares in May 2025. • Amount: ~$147,000 purchase on the open market. • Signal: This is a classic "skin in the game" move. He bought right after securing the new debt deal, likely to signal to the market that he believes bankruptcy is off the table. The Sellers: Everyone Else (Directors & VCs) In the last 3-4 months (specifically Q3 2025), there was a cluster of exits by Board Directors. These do not look like standard "sell to cover taxes" transactions (which are usually small and mechanical); these look like "getting out" sales. • Adam Rothstein (Director): • Action: SOLD ~$300,000 worth of stock in September 2025.  • Note: He dumped a significant portion of his holdings at ~$2.00/share. • Janet Rolle (Director): • Action: SOLD ~$107,000 worth of stock in September 2025. • Angela Acharia (Director): • Action: SOLD multiple times in September 2025, totaling over $200,000. • NEA (Major Shareholder/VC): • Action: Continued to sell blocks of stock in March 2025 and mid-2025. This is typical for a VC firm that needs to eventually close out a fund, but it creates constant selling pressure on the stock price.

moorhound

I mean, markets are still up AH. Big money seems to be leaving retail holding the AI bag and cycling to financials and literally everything else in preparation for the upcoming liquidity flood. As much as I'd love to see the yuppie Y-combinator VC crowd eat shit, this is dirty.

TheoryInttro

We're not. They're just saying that to get the VC's to keep throwing money at them.

RoyalCities

The GPU cloud rental space has been imploding. Their is too much oversupply in the system that H100s can be rented for 1.50 an hour at many places. This is below the breakeven rates not even factoring in the power requirements and points to a lack of demand / oversupply and thim to negative margins. Alot of these companies have exposure here (CoreWeave) so I'd wait until we get some real retracment for the larger AI players than buying any of these. It's sort of a race to the bottom with the business model (especially on a depreciating asset) I honestly think most of these guys will fold or atleast be consolidated because everyone and their mother took VC capital to try to be the next runpod but clearly it's just lead to an overspend.

moorhound

GPUS WIN: Your power bill goes up 40% and your house's water pressure drops like it got a kidney stone so that Silicon Valley VC pricks can make bank and steal your jobs TPUS WIN: Cheap, efficient AI for everybody, America and the whole world wins, GOOGL + POET + LWLG have a baby and everybody's rich NVDA GANG ARE THE VILLAINS. BUY GOOGL

R12Labs

I believe Musk did a lot of coding and was technical. Thiel seems less so. As the video someone posted shows, but behaved more like a VC from the start.

shawman123

Anything is possible in this market. But its going to do 17-18m in revenue this year and most of it is Starlink which has very low margins. Are they even Gross Margin positive overall considering humongous capex required. its easy to get big money through VC/retirement funds etc than going to public where valuation could become a concern. Tesla is valued based on perceived potential of Robotaxi and more important Optimus Robot. What is the thing that will make 1.5 Trillion sensible for SpaceX. May be Space datacenters for all cloud providers. I could see Elon selling that or something crazy like space mining gold or other rare earths. You never know. Either way I watch from sidelines with interest in how it goes.

shawman123

I doubt Spacex will go public. I dont think their financials are screaming for it for sure. Main revenue is from Starlink than launches. Starlink margins are very low. its easier to get big money from VC and keep running the company at very high valuations. I expect SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, DataBricks, Stripe etc to remain private for a while. I would also agree with buying GOOG as indirect exposure rather than going with a Mutual fund for sure. Plus they are not owning 30% of SpaceX for sure. Their total asset value is just 9.5B and SpaceX is just 5.78% of it. [https://markets.ft.com/data/funds/tearsheet/summary?s=BPTRX](https://markets.ft.com/data/funds/tearsheet/summary?s=BPTRX)

ImprovementMain7109

At $1.5T you’re basically paying today for “dominant global infra + Mars story” decades out. On rumored revenue numbers that’s VC-style multiples on a public ticker, with key-man and political risk all concentrated in one guy. If it actually lists anywhere near that, I’d size it like a moonshot, not a core holding.

Haunting-Worker-2301

I’m not really sure why AcreTrader would present an ethical issue unless you are clearly against investors buying farmland. JD Vance was a partner in a VC firm that invested in the company. Just because JD is VP now doesn’t mean he is doing anything with AcreTrader or using it to control anything. AcreTrader very simply buys farms that are for sale, rents them to farmers, and collects the proceeds on rent and sale. You can literally look on their website to see their deals and ask them how they sourced a particular deal. AcreTrader doesn’t own a lot of land in the grand scheme of things, especially compared to other farmland investors. Even if JD Vance wanted to use them for nefarious purposes, I’m not really sure how he would do so taking down 2-5M dollar farms one at a time. If you are against anyone investing in farmland besides farmland operators themselves, I guess that makes sense but then you also shouldn’t invest in the S&P, blackstone, etc since those are all investors that buy things like homes, apartment buildings, etc.

iLikeE

The job market is not fine. Having more job postings does NOT mean that more jobs are available. It would be nice to look at any undoctored and clean jobs reports for the last 2 months. Would be nice to look at true data. On the tech side there are less entry level jobs and stable to less managerial jobs and even less executive positions. Tech salaries are usually highly subsidized by the influx of VC money and option for stock buybacks. This is untenable currently as the huge push over the last 2 years was the resurgence and reawakening of AI which is now being understood even by the most ignorant of VCs that these companies are making sophisticated chat bots and the only way to turn a profit in the next couple of years is to have for for service and/or dilute these chatbots with advertisements. Just my take as someone with close ties to the epicenter of this tech stock market bull rally and the actual reality of the tech job market.

miaminaples

What we have to understand is that today’s asset valuations are paper deep. They aren’t grounded in wages, productivity or real economic output. Rather it’s being inflated by liquidity, elaborate lies told by slick PE and VC types, and accounting conventions that fall apart the moment they’re pressure tested. People confuse market cap with real value, but in actuality a company’s valuation can rise by trillions because a tiny fraction of its shares traded at a higher price. That’s price illusion created at the margin. Those Mag 7 valuations depend on fantasies about perpetual dominance, margin expansion, global growth, and non-disruption. The entire edifice assumes that companies can compound into the tens of trillions without the underlying economy scaling alongside them. If wages don’t rise in tandem with asset prices, then they’re just stacking assumptions on top of liquidity distortion. It isn’t real growth. Real value is what people can earn and spend into the real economy. Paper value is the number you get when you multiply the last trade price by total shares outstanding. Modern markets have grown addicted to the latter, even as the former stagnates. That gap is what’s fueling all the wealth inequality and political distortions we’re seeing. The system keeps compounding on paper while the real economy flatlines. Valuations will keep rising right up until the moment the illusion has to reconcile with real incomes. Then we’ll see what’s actually there and what was just liquidity, narrative, and multiple expansion will be exposed as the illusion that it has always been.

3boobsarenice

we are "just burning VC money" gives me fresh wood every morning

IslandExact429

Still cant believe NVDA doesnt even make the chips Forget being a bull/bear NVDA is the next Intel and Intel is probably the dollar store but reliable chips for the future Theres no point of fancy TPU’s and Nana Banana Pro 2 for consumers unless they’re willing to fork over $100 a month Grok is very expensive and for a reason. Unless consumers pay, which Google is the best example where search is free, we are just burning VC money Also, OpenAI ChatGPT search is still a mess for the foreseeable future

lookamazed

CFPB used to be the place for this… you could still try but all the VC fintech companies are bootlickers.. soo

KeralaBullionaire

I am willing to lend you an ear, because there would be reason for your opinion as such. Would you be willing to share more as to why you feel this way? And true, all new SPACs and new VC led companies entering the indexes are just not making sense, in terms of numbers. Just hyperinflated values of the company without basic and unit economics.

PoopyisSmelly

In typical Chinese fashion, they cant build anything on their own. Company was basically funded with government subsidies and loans and backed by their state owned VC firm in Beijing, even their employees were poached from US companies like NVDA and AMD. I bet their chips are cheap copies of other companies chips. Junk

Boat_of_Charon

This is the answer. I work with private market funds and hedge funds and have really seen small and mid cap begin to underperform. The VC landscape over the last 2 decades and the advent of growth investing really gives fast growing businesses a much longer runway before ipo. I think small and mid cap will now be more of a value hunting ground than rotational outperformer.

prestodigitarium

In a game like investing with power law distributions, that's probably not the winning move. In angel investing/VC, especially, almost all of the returns in aggregate come from a very small fraction of the investments returning >10x.

donedrone707

don't. my last company was owned mainly by the VC firms that funded it to grow and IPO the VC vulture kept diluting, then eventually chapter 11'd, shed all their debt and useless assets and reconsolidated into a smaller, more nimble company that VC douchebag owns 100% of I get nervous when VC firms own too much. insiders owning is good, means they believe in the company

DogNamedFloppy

Vulcan Elements - company backed by Don Jr’s VC firm - secures a $620 million government contract. Draining the swamp so hard. Go murica. 🦅

fkrkz

It might be. As others said, it is really VC money that sustains AI, not revenue. Capex for datacenters Infrastructure costs is sky high and there is no real ROI yet

tragedy_strikes

I hope that S1 scares any delusional retail investors from providing the VC's their exit liquidity. These companies are money burning machines

Domingues_tech

When the VC music stops, Uncle Sam will be the only one left at the table. Why? Because AGI is the new nuke, and we don't let startups own nukes.

tragedy_strikes

VC demand their exit liquidity. Hopefully, retail won't reward them.

SecretAcademic1654

VC wants out so bad. 300 bil for a chatbot is insane.

JoJo_Embiid

yeah but he made that back later and his vision fund is up a lot right now. he's not a buffet style investor but in general he's pretty good. his vision fund raised 100B dollars, his ARM deal alone made 120B profit. wework is a huge rubbish bet but he made those back in other deals that's how VC style investing works

_hiddenscout

Totally lol. Yeah, i mean if you like it, go for it, it's your money. In the short term, there is a lot of trading happening around quantum. I just think when we talk about the AI Bubble, I think of stuff like nuclear and quantum being part of the actual bubble. Same with the all the VC backed dumb apps. I do like Honeywell more than that spin off though. I'm stoked to pick up some of the Aerospace line of business, that's what really interests me.

Ok-Pianist-5562

Thanks for this, its helpful to have your honest views on this and certainly food for thought. It's actually REALLY interesting. So I'm actually from Jersey 🇯🇪 You mentioned it is BVI company HQ in Jersey. Weshop was purchased by a HNW in Jersey from the UK hence mind and management here. It's a BVI company, but many private wealth vehicles (which this was) were historically setup in BVI which is quite common, so not as fishy as it might seem. So not a SPAC, but yes a Special Purpose Vehicle. The financials definitely don't make for good reading and blow ratios like P/E out of the water, but have to be read in the context that this basically a capital hungry VC start up over the past few years whilst trying to IPO. Heavy on marketing (athletes / influencers etc) in the early years for brand awareness and acceptance. I've been watching it for a few years (as I said above I've been USING the app). So I think its unfair to call it an insiders dumping scheme, but I can see why you might say that. The 12 month share maturity time-frame is to stop users making purchases, getting shares, then returning goods / receiving refunds. Which might better explain that aspect. Thanks for looking into it. One thing I dont understand, is who's buying into it? At that price... Surely its the anticipated growth that is priced in there? They are looking to launch in the US, so perhaps that's the thinking?

ChainOfThot

Elon isn't a VC, he doesn't invest in companies he doesn't build

coffeesippingbastard

thing is that nvidia knows the VC and tech community. Elon still walks on water. Tech treats Elon the way that republicans treat Trump. They idolize him and he in turn drives the hype train.

Bostradomous

The same way VC drug companies grew revenues while losing patients: charge more money but collect from less people. On paper the revenues are up, but the business itself is shrinking. It’s essentially an accounting trick that will eventually catch up to them.

RoyalCities

Yeah GPUs don't hold their value long term. I mean they do NOW because VC funded startups have choked the supply but that's more of a scarcity reason than say technical leaps. It also depends on the card. Consumer / GTX cards would depreciate faster than the datacenter ones. The datacenter cards are tested and rated for 24/7 operation. I remember after the 2017 crypto boom a bunch of cards hit the market that were used for mining and the life you get out of them just isn't the same as if they were used for light gaming. Alot more fan death, artifacts - general hardware failure.

RoyalCities

Too much competition and too much supply. There was ALOT of VC capital flooding startups hoping to be the best runpod. These are the companies who created the shortage plus the mag 7 of course. But I mean seeing how low the pricing has gotten and the projections that the cloud rental space will go lower Im inclined to think there was simply too many players piling in at one time. I did cloud training (before I got my own rig) so watched the prices tank basically in real time over the past year and a half. This article is interesting on the subject.

Aggravating-Salad441

I think you're underestimating the impact to the ecosystem. Why wouldn't Google, Amazon, and Microsoft take a hit if OpenAI failed? While everyone says these companies have earnings, it's also true that a lot of their earnings growth is coming from cloud segments. Those cloud segments are growing rapidly by hoovering up VC money from all (mostly unprofitable) AI companies. What happens when the VC money stops pouring into OpenAI and Mistral and ___? That will crush the most important customer segment for cloud earnings growth. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft won't go out of business. Obviously. They'll still be profitable. Obviously. But they very well could see earnings decline for a year or two as the excesses are squeezed out. Multiples investors are willing to pay would decline. There's no way the infrastructure companies skate free when OpenAI stumbles. Don't confuse survival with thriving.

lolkkthxbye

OpenAIs spending is partially responsible for NVDAs earnings. All fueled by debt and VC. I think you’d see a decline in earnings among the AI supply chain (data centers, memory, etc). Good news is all that VC money can be redirected to better investments.

Panda_Pam

Financial advisors, if they are from big firms like JPM, ML, etc., can give you access to alternative investments. I don't mean bitcoin or gold, I mean private equity, exchange funds, VC funds, etc. that you wouldn't be able to get in open market. Imagine if you were a VC invested Anthropic a couple of years ago, you would be banking right now! Alternative investments would be good for diversification, especially if you think AI bubble and recession will lead to a big correction in the market. One caveat is that private equity and exchange funds come with higher fees (I've seen up to 5%, they usually have performance fee on top of admin fees if the investment is doing well) , minimum size requirements (the smallest minimum investment that I've come accross is $50k), and for the most part less liquid. But if you're young, have excess money that you don't need for the next 7 to 10 years, it is not a big issue. With regard to fees, you can negotiate fee reduction as your portfolio grows. I've been able to get my fees reduced from 1% to 0.9%, to 0.7% over 10 years period, and should be able to get it down to 0.6% in the next year based on growth projections. Also, if you're interested in private equity or exchange funds, have your financial advisor waived the placement fee.

blbd

In the abstract, no. If you build a network and start to meet people, yes. But it has to be a subject you are passionate about and interested in so you know what to look for. I have experience doing startup companies, so once I hit accredited status, I put a small amount of money into a VC, where I know everybody that works there.  If you do it randomly just because you can without planning it, that will underperform a Boglehead three fund portfolio. 

SelenaMeyers2024

Yeah this is not the way.... Asst is a play.... So is dfli... So is inhd.... Everyone gets a piece. Play VC where you expect each position to fail and one to 5x or more

kadam_ss

This is a desperate attempt by private investors and VCs to dump openAI bags ok retail. If this AI bubble “pops”, public companies like mag7 would get hurt bad, but smaller private companies will get wiped out. That will wipe out tens/hundreds of billions of private capital, VC money. Last ditch effort to move risk to retail

WelpSigh

The hit would be that they wasted a shitload of money on something that will never make them money, which would be Bad. The business is large enough to withstand it. The issue with "monster demand" is that right now, the AI companies lose money on every query. Inference costs exceed revenue per prompt. That is without factoring in the capex and R&D spend. That isn't likely to change in the near future. Businesses and consumers are not paying the true price of AI by any means, it's subsidized with VC money.

Electronic_Muffin218

Yes, the codebase has to change if folks have hard-coded to CUDA (presumably any of the larger NVIDIA customers do this to maximize ROI, but they are also the most well-positioned to rewrite to TensorFlow or whatever is the new hotness for TPU use in Google Cloud). TensorFlow continues to work on NVIDIA, but I have no idea how optimal it is or not. The general advantage to the TPUs is going to be cost over time - less expensive per unit/work for Google to build, and they design and deploy a new generation roughly every year that delivers better efficiency per unit power. Yes, NVIDIA will continue to produce higher-density chips over time, too - but I don't believe they are as efficient at comparable tasks and the gap will continue to widen - but IANAMLP. I suspect Google will have to discount TPU pricing vs. comparable NVIDIA pricing to attract customers afraid of vendor lock-in to TensorFlow, but their cost of goods to deliver those units of processing has got to be much lower. Presumably some tasks are more suited to CUDA (See [Google docs here](https://docs.cloud.google.com/tpu/docs/intro-to-tpu) for a list of tasks that aren't optimal on TPUs). I have a feeling larger companies will move to multivendor ML/GenAI provider sourcing for all of the same reasons they do so for general cloud compute today - price leverage. Yes, there is pain in having to write to N different APIs. There are some solution providers who abstract that away, but you have to pay a price for those software layers. Here's how adoption goes for the little guys: \- startup founders DIY for a time on rented cloud AI, nudged toward one vendor by their benevolent VC advisers for Kairetsu purposes \- eventually, the company scales so much that they negotiate a deal to get preferred bulk pricing from any one of the big vendors \- eventually, the company gets bent over so badly by that one vendor that they immediately rewrite on some sort of intermediate abstraction layer and pay the price to get access to deployment on the other cloud vendors, so they get some pricing leverage back \- eventually, the company gets big enough to make it worthwhile to rewrite directly to each cloud vendors' APIs and make their own abstraction layer At any point along the way, the little guys may die, get acquired, or stall out at a size where it doesn't make sense to go to the next stage. Here's how adoption goes for the big-sized guys whose primary competency is not computer systems: \- endless RFPs for years handheld by consultants, eventually deal is inked, consultants get paid handsomely to start moving workloads into the cloud \- the solution gets rebuilt a few times over the ensuing years, never quite working as advertised, but well enough to claim some victories for director and VP promptions

OutsideSpirited2198

AWS is losing with startups. Most of their introductions to startups come from VC trying to lock them into AWS contracts with early credits, but startups are waiting before approaching VCs and building on cheaper infra these days. Short term not a problem but long term might be.

Sleepergiant2586

##Everyone knows OpenAI is gonna go IPO and will easily raise billion smaybe even trillions. Raising money from private VC market or via IPO is no big deal. Infact I am betting in 2026 their IPO is gonna come and suddenly shoot up prices of all the companies who they dealt with.

RoyalCities

P/E is one metric but stock concentration is another risk to consider. Cisco alone was around 4% of the s&p during the dot com era and Nvidia is at 7. It's gotten as high as 8 making it the most concentrated stock since record keeping began. The mag 7 accounted for around 40% of the entire s&p. When you have high concentration like that it makes the whole market more fragile. Also all the deals being made are within the 1 sector. 70% of Nvidia's sales are to other mag 7s and the rest is going to VC funded fabs trying to compete with runpod. I train these models and every single day I'm fed new ads from random companies I've never heard of offering h100s for peanuts. I don't think this is sustainable so if it isn't a bubble I atleast expect some closures and consolidation because it's just not sustainable.

Hot-Celebration5855

I listed two companies that invested in them. Now scar that math up for meta, oracle, a dozen other major tech companies investing in these companies. Not to mention the enormous amount of VC money they can tap into. Wake me up when any of these businesses has a down round in their equity raises.

WaveZealousideal2848

I like that it has a small market cap and the weekly chart trend is looking very nice. They also have some contracts that look juicy, any good news will push this thing up. Here's some AI jargon: * **RM 11.6 million (\~US$ 2.6 M) Rooftop Solar Contract** * Contract to build a rooftop solar PV generating facility in Malaysia. * Construction expected to take **2 years**. Then, after construction, FGL signs an O&M (operations & maintenance) agreement (15–21 years). * The company says it expects a *double-digit profit margin* on this deal. * **Multiple Large-scale Solar LOAs Worth \~US$5.5 M** * FGL received several *Letters of Award* (LOAs) for large solar projects. * Their scope in these projects includes full EPCC services, supply & install of dc/ac systems, instrumentation & control, civil work, etc. * **Conditional LOA: \~US$68 M for 100 MW Solar Farm** * A conditional LOA (letter of award) for a 100 MW solar farm in Tanjung Malim, Malaysia. * This project is interesting because it is tied to an **AI data center** in Enstek City, suggesting FGL is aligning with data infrastructure + green power. * **MOU with GCL – USD $220 M Potential Project Value** * Memorandum of Understanding with GCL Systems to jointly develop renewable energy projects (PV + possibly storage) across Malaysia / ASEAN, with a potential project value of up to US$220M. * This could significantly boost FGL’s pipeline if fully realized. * Very aggressive pipeline: The company is targeting up to **RM 17.4 billion** (\~USD 4.1 billion) in EPCC opportunity through 2028. * They are partnering with **GCL Systems Integration Technology Co. Ltd.** on renewable energy projects across Malaysia and the ASEAN region (MOU signed). * They are integrating **AI / drone technology**: working with VC AI Ltd to develop AI-powered drones for solar farm inspections. The idea is to reduce O&M costs and improve efficiency in monitoring solar panels. * Geographical expansion: They’ve expressed interest / activity in Vietnam — e.g., a proposed acquisition of an 80% stake in a Vietnamese solar company (VES 1).

JacquesHome

You seem to be really stuck on the stock buybacks and bad Google leadership. Don't take this wrong way, or do, I don't think you are in any position to judge Sundar / Google as having bad leadership. First, Google has more than enough cash to spend $50B a year on CapEx AND do stock buybacks. Second, Google has trounced the QQQ by 1.5x over the past 5 years and by 2.5x since Sundar became CEO. Google dominates every market it plays in Search, Ads, and Youtube (kills Netflix by a wide margin). They have a portfolio of Deeptech bets that would make any VC jealous.

JacquesHome

Incorrect and horrendously bad take. OpenAI has access to equity financing which everyone knows is the higher cost of capital. Google has access to the debt markets and free cash flow. Google can spend $50B a year for the next 10 years and it will have ZERO impact on their viability as a business. You are seeing the narrative on OpenAI change in real-time, every additional dollar raised for OpenAI is now going to come with higher scrutiny and more onerous terms. I've been in the VC ecosystem for over two decades now, I've seen this story play out too many times. OpenAI isn't going to implode or fail or die, thats stupid, but things are about to get harder for them.

Jedclark

Google's biggest moat is just infinite piles of cash. They can run Gemini at a loss for a very long time to shut the VC-backed companies out. I do wonder if this affects OpenAI/Anthropic's pricing power, they can't "turn on the money machine" the way companies like Meta did with Facebook/Instagram for example because they don't have the monopoly/network effect in this area. Putting prices up is the perfect time for Google to say "Gemini subs are now $5 to new users".

salespunk44

Having been in and around firms funded by VC’s and Private Equity I can tell you they are momentum lemmings. If they see a hot sector they pile in hoping to ride the wave. The secret is they only need 1 in 10 to hit. That is their metric.

therealsilentjohn

> the dilution will erase the yield and then some This is, indeed, a *huge* issue with most networks. When you read that whateverChain has 70% yield for staking, it's usually a VC-backed, centralized, low-usage, high inflation network. Some networks, like Ethereum, have a fee burn mechanism. During high usage time periods more supply is destroyed then created, creating deflation of the supply. During low usage time periods, more supply is created, incentivizing staking. You can see this in realtime on https://ultrasound.money > In other words it's only sustainable with a continuous influx of users. So it's arguably not a Ponzi in the dictionary definition of the word but the dynamics sound awfully similar, there's just an extra step in the middle. You're just describing how *any* market works. Yes, if there's no users for the network, then the coins just inflate away and the coins are worthless. That's also how the stock market works, or Amazon marketplace. Other than buying a house, land, or productive equipment ***all you are ever buying is something that has social value***. The end of that line of reasoning is to stock up on a bunker to survive the apocalypse and become self-sufficient. Most of those "real" things effectively amount to buying your way into another job. Want to buy farmland? Great, how does that improve your life? Are you going to farm it? That's buying your way into a job. Want to buy rental property? Great, are you going to be a property manager? That's buying your way into a job. Stocks are owning nothing just as equally as crypto. Being backed by physical company holdings? By the time a company would go through bankrupcy you are last in line to claim and you aren't seeing a cent. Owning gold? You ever actually buy physical gold? Like, have it shipped to your house? If not, then to you it's as immaterial as crypto. If yes, were the atoms in it really so useful that it's what you bought? Did it's weight and luster improve your life somehow?

Huge-Albatross9284

It's a huge tech focused Japanese VC/asset manager specializing in tech with a whacky nutjob founder. It get's reported on because he does outlandish things all the time.

insightful_pancake

It is an investment firm but not a PE firm like the ones you mentioned. It’s highly relevant today given its large investments in AI companies, notably its ~$30bn investment in OpenAI, and its recent sale of NVDA. The company was, a few months ago briefly, the largest company by market cap in Japan and has been notable for decades, also driving much of the VC wave and tech investment during the 2010s and early 2020s (with a mixed record but I digress). The CEO has also been very vocal with the media for decades so he gets more attention than more less public CEOs (eg at the companies you mentioned).

Distinct_Recipe4798

Remember 2008 happened cause outright lies on the financial side + people bought houses they literally can't afford, and banks lending this money literally could not pay it back when they needed it. For this bubble to implode, what will be needed is a combination like that such as lies about financials + outward pressure to force OpenAi and all these companies to pay back the money they got from VC investors. If firing people to "replace them with AI" doesn't payoff where they literally don't have the money to pay it back then the bubble will blow. Without the pressure the bubble could indefinitely continue.

wazzu_free

Nvidia is still beating expectations is true, but , this revenue is derived almost entirely from infrastructure build-out (CapEx), not yet from sustainable consumer application utility (OpEx). It feels like we are building a massive centralized structure where the revenue is just money circulating from VC/Big Tech into Hardware( AI Hype → Massive CapEx (buying GPUs) → Amazing Revenue for Hardware companies → Validates Hype → More CapEx circle jerk), without enough leaving the system as end-user value yet. When cash becomes desirable (as you noted), companies might tighten that CapEx spending first. If the shovels stop selling because no one is finding enough gold, the correction could be deeper than just a valuation reset.

Inspector330

I disagree. The Dot Com bubble had people investing in worthless fantasies. They were not investing in the internet itself. While it may be true non publicly traded companies may be eating up VC money by adding the AI buzzword to anything they to (in this case it is the dot Com bubble), there are a few major players leading the new tech revolution. This is still the early stages. If you invested in any of the early revolutionary big players during the Dot Com era, you would be tremendously wealthy today. Think 20 years ahead, and spot the obvious leaders in the field. Just like the internet, any company that doesn't properly implement AI in due time will become obsolete or stagnate in growth.  Do you really believe nations around the world are all wrong? This isn't about what AI can do now. This is about growing it into what it can do in the future. 

Ok_Ground9015

You leave him alone. He just has a very high IQ, and no real knowledge or common sense. His speculation was formed on conjecture at best. Usually people with high IQ are just good at seeing patterns. I've taken a couple of IQ test. It gave me a good understanding of what they test for. I'm not even moderately gifted, nor above average. I'm on the tippy top end of average. Though it didn't test for any of my accumulated knowledge whatsoever. I'm fluent in 12 programming languages, fairly good at pattern recognition, excellent at problem solving, certified 6 times from Harvard in computer science, certified in integrated digital imaging and commercial computer graphics from TSTC, certified in networking and databases from VC, and been making websites, producing music, digital art since the 90s. The IQ test is garbage for testing intelligence. I would have likely scored the same on the IQ test without any education after junior high.

_hiddenscout

Volume in general goes down this time of year and we’ll get the tax harvesting moves soon as well.  I find the AI bubble thing interesting, since I think it’s somewhat true. Personally I’m not worried about like hyperscalers or companies with billions of FCF.  I think there is more of a bubble with VC AI backed apps, the nuclear names, quantum, and some of the names financing things. 

_hiddenscout

I do think they are parts of the AI trade in a bubble, but not all of it. Nuance is something that is lost online a lot and sometimes in investing.  Like I’m not worried about the hyperscalers who have billions in FCF, but see the stuff like growth in nuclear names and quantum as more part of the the bubble of the AI trade. Especially the stuff VC is funding of just a bunch of bad apps. 

goldmedalsharter

They'll raise cash if they don't. Greedy VC piggies will pay.

OldPersimmon7704

It's still a great tool and won't go anywhere. It should still be understood that the vast majority of AI implementations aren't profitable, and that's before we reach the point where the AI companies start trying to take profits. Once OpenAI starts profit-taking instead of writing off billions in losses to stoke the hysteria, I'd expect that AI profitability rate to move dangerously close to zero. People in the market are launching money at AI based on a sales pitch while fundamentally not understanding what the technology is and what the limitations are. I have a computer engineering degree and know how this works under the hood. Two things become very obvious when you have a real tech background: (1) This doesn't scale forever and (2) the hallucination issue is very likely unsolveable. Under the extremely likely circumstances that we can't solve hallucinations, do you think a technology that you can *never* fully trust is worth this much? Does it also make sense to pay some multiple of what we're paying now for API tokens once the VC money dries up? I would think not in most cases...

letsgobernie

Exactly. The whole hypothesis has been that there are insignificant/insufficient uses for this tech, net earnings to be made now and in the future to justify the expenses . So the chain goes: precarious LLM based startups cobbling together expensive/useless stuff > OpenAI > large tech companies > Nvidia Nvidia is literally in the end of the queue - able to sell hardware while the ones who are supposed to show utility in this tech and heavy investments come up empty. Whos aid we'll jump straight to hardware sale slowdown? Maybe people here did, but they are not articulating the bear thesis correctly then. Look for the private VC investments to start dropping in valuations, cause they are the weakest, then OpenAI loses a bunch of its API calls and shrinks in revenue, maybe goes through a downround, and now people start asking questions about utility, about pausing data center build outs and pausing Nvidia HW purchases - literally happens towards the end.

Spear_n_Magic_Helmet

there’s only one share of me and my EPS this quarter was better than 1.30 so. Accepting VC money.

981flacht6

Most of the bers don't really know what they're talking about. I've been invested in Nvidia since 2017, and researching their work since 2015 in their non-gaming work. I've been a customer of Nvidia since 2000. Bers get hyperfocused on short thesis opinions, amplifying the same claims without realizing how much of the market itself has changed over the past 5-10 years. We have far greater market participants, we have more developed countries, we have larger market access in it of itself. We have the correct tailwind alignment for this to all grow at a hyper-accelerated growth. Are there bubbles in here? Yeah sure, some places yes. I see it more in Private Equity / VC space with crazy valuations all over again that parallels with the tech bubble 10 years ago. Funny enough, you can google "Sam Altman" and "tech bubble" and find an article where he talks about bubbles 10 years ago, and you can read it for yourself and ask Grok/Perplexity/ChatGPT to steelman both sides and see what you see. But ask more questions and you might see what I see. I think, there is too much attention on hyperscalers, but there's so much to come with robotics, healthcare, sovereign AI etc.

gamjatang111

i just foresee more Mamdanis emerging. No way for younger generation to fight back, now they just yolo into sports betting and robinhood. Before they could yolo into Defi but now that space is all VC backed grifters

Ghould72

It reminds me of pre-2008. Back then, everyone was into trading - you’d get stock tips from random people. The market feels like a giant roulette game where everyone’s following the guy they think is on a hot streak. The problem is compounded by leverage stacked on top of leverage, and people have normalised this. Meanwhile, the debt locusts are running out of crops. VC is picked over, PE is picked over, real estate, etc. - now all that’s left is barren brown scrubland: subprime borrowers. Hardly enough to sustain them, but they’ll devour it anyway. Or perhaps it’s closer to 1929 than we’d like to admit?

Apprehensive_Two1528

A latecomer doesn’t void their VC status. it doesn’t mean it didn’t mature the investment.. what’s your entry time to do with softbank’s VC status?

AALen

Peter thiel is a fine VC but a horrible fund manager. He's lost so much money. Burry shorts everything. He's trying to relive his subprime glory days. He recently shut down Scion after finally realizing how out of sync he is with the markets. SoftBank sold NVDA to buy OpenAI, NVDA’s customer. 😂

fallingdowndizzyvr

Softbank wasn't a "VC" when it came to that Nvidia position. They didn't establish that position until 2020. They were a latecomer. I bought Nvidia in 2008. And I'm just a retail schmuck.

PTRBoyz

Anthropic looks like a great investment. OpenAI looks like VC bukkake. 

Reddit_Wombat

I think it's because there needs to be a trigger for the bubble to pop. At the end of the day, the bubble is far more than just inflated AI stocks; it's really more of a bet from big tech corporations, VC/PE, and AI startups that they/their investments can stay solvent long enough to become profitable (as others have said). This shouldn't be much of a problem for big tech (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, etc.) alone, but startups like OpenAI are making huge bets that they are forcing everyone to match. If OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. reach a point where they can't continue to raise money to fulfill their obligations, then the bubble pops - however, their investors are incentivised to keep the bubble from popping, so they keep investing. Kind of a chicken or the egg situation. This fascinates me, so I made a video about my take on it: [https://youtu.be/c2o0fUfsWWU?si=KmkyEIUdG8RsWxZC](https://youtu.be/c2o0fUfsWWU?si=KmkyEIUdG8RsWxZC)

Clear_Anything1232

Lol googl snapped its fingers And set timer on two of the largest VC funded startups And it's not even google IO Just an ancillary product to Gemini 3

johndsmits

I think a lot don't realize this. I didn't get that until recently having bought sponsorships in professional trade groups coupled with ego driven folks. And these young folks usually are some VC fellow which pays for these articlesm....Mind that most of the F500 are paid for too. Sham.

NormalAddition8943

lol removed by moderator? Did someone from a large firm contact their paid mod to yank the story, because this week wasn't meant to be a negative-news week to help shore up exit liquidity? --- For those that missed it: ### Peter Thiel dumps top AI stock, stirring bubble fears Peter Thiel dumps top AI stock, stirring bubble fears A quiet selloff raises fresh questions about AI’s surge. By Moz Farooque Edited by Celine Provini It comes at a surprising point when Wall Street’s been busy declaring the chipmaker as virtually untouchable. Although Nvidia recently surpassed a $5 trillion valuation, Thiel walked away completely, shrinking his fund’s equity book by roughly two-thirds while building it around three megacap names. That’s far from being a rebalance and more of an emphatic statement. Thiel had previously warned about AI’s hype cycle running far ahead of its real economics, and his Q3 portfolio shakeup aligns with that view. Peter Thiel co-founder of PayPal Inc addresses the Republican National Nominating Convention. Who is Peter Thiel? Peter Thiel isn’t like a tourist wandering through the tech world; in fact, he has been instrumental in building the modern version of it. He co-founded fintech giant PayPal, ran it as CEO, and took it public before becoming the first outside investor in Facebook. Later, he co-founded the most popular defense AI company in Palantir, where he remains chairman, while helping turn Founders Fund into perhaps Silicon Valley’s most influential VC shop, that’s backed businesses such as the likes of SpaceX and Airbnb. On the investing side of things, he runs his hedge fund, Thiel Macro LLC, which held nearly $74.4 million in long U.S. stocks as of Q3, which is down remarkably from $212 million in Q2. Moreover, his personal net worth is an eye-popping $16.3 billion as of 2025. Thiel’s Q3 filing unveiled perhaps the sharpest pivots of any major investor in the tech space so far this year. While Nvidia continues to power through blowout quarters and leap past a $5 trillion market cap, Thiel Macro LLC heads in the opposite direction. The fund didn’t just trim Nvidia, it eliminated it. Over 537,000 shares, which represent nearly 40% of the entire portfolio, just vanished from the 13F. Vistra Energy, another 19% chunk, was wiped out as well. What raises eyebrows even more is what Nvidia has been doing with quarterly sales surging from $39.3 billion to $46.7 billion, spearheaded by a 56% bump in data-center revenues, with analysts modeling a shot at $1 trillion in annual sales by 2030. Collectively, Thiel’s disclosed equity book dropped from nearly $212 million in Q2 to just $74.4 million in Q3, an almost two-thirds reduction. Moreover, the fund’s turnover hovered over 80%, leaving just three holdings: Tesla, Microsoft, and Apple. Tesla was pared back to just 65,000 shares, accounting for nearly 39% of the book. Meanwhile, Thiel’s fund invested in Microsoft and Apple, accounting for 34% and 27%, respectively, of the portfolio. Here are Peter Thiel’s Q3 13F portfolio moves: Sold Entire Positions ``` Nvidia (NVDA) Shares sold: 537,742 Prior weight: 40.07% of portfolio Result: Exited fully Vistra (VST) Shares sold: 208,747 Prior weight: 19.08% Result: Exited fully New Positions Added Apple (AAPL) Shares added: +79,181 Portfolio weight: 27.08% Estimated avg. price: $219.89 Microsoft (MSFT) Shares added: +49,000 Portfolio weight: 34.09% Estimated avg. price: $502.61 ``` With Thiel Corp hitting zero with Nvidia, a clear message stands out in a market that has been obsessed with anything AI. Nvidia’s fundamentals have been explosive, and Thiel has praised that dominance, hailing Nvidia as the clear hardware leader. On the other hand, he has warned that the AI hype cycle is getting out of hand, comparing the moment to 1999, when investors priced in a future that would take roughly 15-20 years to unfold. He’s not alone, either. Jeff Bezos described the massive AI boom as an “industrial bubble.” Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon points to a 12- to 24-month drawdown. Similarly, legendary investor James Anderson called Nvidia’s $100 billion OpenAI financing idea “disconcerting.” Most recently, the Big Short’s Michael Burry has put massive put positions against Nvidia and Palantir. That’s why Thiel rotated into Microsoft and Apple, tech giants with more diversified revenue streams, cloud scale, devices, and software. Thiel feels AI is transformative but slow-burning, and the platforms, not the current pure-play chip rocket, offer economics that will actually last. --- Here's the 13F filing: https://13f.info/manager/0001562087-thiel-macro-llc

MagnesiumOvercast

The VC class souring on Facebook then didn't hurt them, Facebook's revenue then and now is about selling ads. The VC class souring on Nvidia is a huge deal because almost all of Nvidia's business is selling GPUs to companies controlled by the VC class. People here thinking that AI is bullshit doesn't matter, but if Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos a critical mass of Silicon Valley execs ever come to that conclusion, Nvidia gets evaporated. Maybe Thiel has heterodox opinions on AI and the rest of his ilk will keep the boom going, who knows, but this is not a good sign for the industry.

Apprehensive_Two1528

VC money is gone after the initial high profit stage. It's callled maturing the investment 

upscaleHipster

Small emerging VC funds

Monkey_1505

You say things may be more profitable sooner than we think, and then use Chinese open source models as examples, which are specifically focused on efficiency, lower costs, and aren't swimming in VC capital.

PercentageGlobal6443

OpenAI failing to convert from non-profit to for profit meaning all their raised funds convert into debt. They can't do this because AI is not profitable, even their paying users cost them more than the subscriptions. The last infusion of cash they got was literally record breaking, and barring any legitimately miraculous advancement in technology, there isn't enough VC funding or government bailout to cover what they are going to need to stay operational. When OpenAI collapses it will tank Nvidia. When Nvidia goes it's so closely tied to all other Mag 8 they will tank in value as well. How low? Who knows? Things could change between now and then as well, but as of right now, that's how it's looking.

Clear_Anything1232

That's for their cloud customers and to power their own needs for enterprise solutions Open ai has been raising trillions for essentially ai slop videos burning VC money So these 2 aren't the same

Blarghnog

Six ways this usually happens: 1) Inheritance 2) Business founder exit 3) Lucky investor (scale equity ownership (think angel, VC, crypto very lucky early employee of a unicorn) 4) Lottery 5) Illicit gains 6) Lawsuit settlement beneficiary That’s almost everyone I’ve met with that kind of cash at that age.

Clear_Anything1232

Only if they don't run on VC money 😂

Hypeman747

Trial balloon or def a grift so VC and other investors can’t drop their bags . Clear out any institutions that want that type of guidance and just focus on institutions that will play ball and retail.

ptwonline

VC's are still run by people, and are not immune to getting caught up in hype and greed.

eerst

Literally the play book of big VC.

keener91

He changes his tune depending on the VC interest in buying or selling.

drummer820

It’s funny to me how every VC and tech founder is now saying “oh yeah, this is overinvested, people are gonna lose money… but MY company is different!”

thx1138inator

What about all the other AI firms that are raking in VC cash?

mcs5280

Most of these jobs are just posted to show VC funds that the company is expanding rapidly and convince them to invest 

deviousbrutus

The big VC players selling kills these companies. They can usually only sell once public if they want to make huge bucks, but I guarantee the OpenAI filing will not go well. There's a reason OpenAI and Anthropic are private. 

trymorecookies

Lots of money is being thrown at a loss business, so it seems to be a bubble unless profits show up. This could be the new NFTs, staying afloat as long as VC dudes still think it's cool.