Michael Burry
The investor made famous by The Big Short, now one of the loudest sceptics of how AI companies account for their chips.
Michael Burry is the hedge fund investor who bet against the American housing market before the 2008 crash, a story told in the book and film The Big Short. He has spent the AI boom making a narrower and more technical argument, and it is worth understanding because it keeps resurfacing whenever the industry’s finances are discussed.
His claim is about depreciation, the rate at which a company writes down the value of equipment it has bought. Big cloud companies spread the cost of AI chips over five to seven years, while Nvidia replaces its top chips every two to three. If the chips really go stale faster than the books assume, profits are being overstated, by roughly 176 billion dollars between 2026 and 2028 in Burry’s estimate. Nvidia disputes this, pointing to old hardware still in commercial use and to rental prices that keep rising.