David Sacks Says the Biggest Risk to the AI Buildout Isn’t Demand, ‘If You Had Dark GPUs, That’d Be a Disaster for Everyone’

Wall Street has spent the last week absorbing Nvidia's (NVDA) plan to arrange half a trillion dollars of other people's money, and the sharpest objection came from someone who was explicitly trying to argue the other side. Asked on the All-In podcast published Aug. 14 where the arrangement could break, David Sacks, while still an overall bull on AI and similar, is acutely aware of the risks of the massive, multi-trillion-dollar AI buildout, saying, "The biggest risk to me is not on the demand side," he said. "The biggest risk is that you get a glut of compute and you get an overbuild. And in the same way that we had dark fiber after the dotcom crash, if you had dark GPUs, that'd be a disaster for everyone."

On Aug. 10, Nvidia said it had signed memorandums of understanding with Apollo (APO), BlackRock (BLK), Blackstone (BX), Brookfield (BN), Goldman Sachs (GS), and KKR (KKR) to establish independent compute financing platforms to "mobilize over $500 billion of third-party capital for the buildout of AI infrastructure over time." The release adds that the partnerships "remain subject to execution of the final agreements." Meaning, that figure is an aspiration, not raised money, not committed money, and not Nvidia revenue. Several outlets blurred the distinction.