Felix Salmon Essay: The AI Boom Needs a Market for Compute

There’s money — really big money — in selling compute, the processing power driving the AI revolution.

Hyperscaler CoreWeave Inc. is worth more than $50 billion even as its losses are projected to increase tenfold this year, to $650 million. Oracle Corp., meanwhile, recently added some $250 billion to its market capitalization overnight after revealing the size of its upcoming order book. What’s unclear is whether those valuations are based on a scarcity thesis — that demand is likely to outstrip supply for years to come — or an abundance thesis, foreseeing a multitrillion-dollar market where these companies ...