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Chamath Palihapitiya
@chamath
Social Capital 8090 God is in the details.
Joined April 2007
1.2K Following    2.5M Followers
Super interesting comparison of GPU finance and the AI buildout to airlines. I’ve seen two other people make this comparison now: 1. Ken Griffin 2. Sridhar Ramaswamy Both are very, very smart so worth learning more.
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A lot of ink has been spilled on GPU financing lately. I spent over a decade trading ABS on Wall St, and structured over $2B+ of debt financings as an operator (including at @tryramp). Figured I'd try to make sense of this market, so I went back to a framework I knew well: aircraft ABS and aircraft engine ABS. My take: a GPU neocloud runs on airline economics, and the debt behind it looks a lot like aircraft engine ABS. The parallels: • Perishable inventory. An empty seat after the door closes is gone forever. So is an idle hour on an energized H100 rack. • 85%+ of cost is fixed (servers, 10-year rack leases, 10-14% debt service). One more hour of compute costs pennies of power. • Utilization is everything. Airlines break even around 80% load factor, a levered GPU cluster around 65-75%. The returns live in those last 25 percentage points. • NVIDIA is Boeing and Airbus rolled into one. Powered shells and grid interconnects are the new airport slots. • Wall St copied the aircraft financing playbook: take-or-pay contract plus servers in a bankruptcy-remote SPV, 70-80% LTV. Part 1 of my blog post goes into a lot more detail:
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