Better Offline - Monologue: Amazon Is Warehousing Billions In GPUs

Episode Date: October 23, 2026

In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron walks you through how Amazon is warehousing billions of dollars of GPUs, and how NVIDIA created an artificial supply chain crisis by forcing hyperscalers to take early delivery of its AI chips.Business Insider: Amazon is buying billions in Nvidia AI systems it can't yet turn onhttps://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-nvidia-ai-gpu-data-centers-power-shortages-2026-10?utm_campaign=business-link-post&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitterNewsletter: AI Had Better Work Outhttps://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-had-better-work-out/ Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1 YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. I'm Melissa Jeltson, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police rode off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing in disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription, exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to IHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for IHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. People wake up and go, oh, damn, wait a hold up. They change all of that? Yes. It's real. This is a wholesale attack. It is targeting black people in every federal agency. It's raw. Why folks have never allowed that reckoning to last more than a decade. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the IHart radio app, Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. In February of 2024, celebrated illustrator and children's book author, Patra Mathers and her husband Michael mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know they had died by suicide. Dear honies, this is goodbye. by the time you get this letter, both Petra and I will be dead. Next stop, Wonderland.

Why did they do it? And what did it do to the people they left behind? Listen to Death of an Artist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Is there an epidemic against literature? More specifically, black literature. I'm Jack Quist-Pice Thomas, and on this season of the Black Lit podcast, we're outside asking why. They don't want a whole bunch of little elevators. is Michael Maxis and Martin Luther King running around.

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One recent episodes of The Questlove Show, I chat with Jojo about her music and Wallow 267 about his story, everything in between. Don't invite me to karaoke. I'm going to make it weird. Someone's going to try to sing, leave get out or too little too late or baby to you. And I'm going to be like, okay, cool.

Check out my conversation with Jojo, Wallo 267 and more on the Questlove show. Listen to the Questlove show on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Peace. Also, media. Greetings, salutations, and hello. I'm Ed Zittron, and this is this week's Better Offline monologue. Better Offline. Congratulations to Eugene Kim of Business Insider for getting one of the biggest scoops of the AI bubble.

Confirming my estimate that billions of dollars of Nvidia GPUs were being warehoused and an incredible story about Amazon's early rack receipt program. According to BI, some Amazon Web Services data center sites had room for more racks, but not enough available power to turn them on, leaving the equipment to be staged at intermediary warehouses until the facilities were ready. B.I. adds that Amazon used to not have to pay for those racks until the gear was put into the data center, but that, and I quote, the intensity of the AI data center building boom has made this type of coordination harder, with Amazon having to compete more for scarce resources as it jockeys with rivals for access to invidia GPUs and other AI components. Very strange for one of the largest buyers of GPUs to be talking about scarcity of an object that it has so much of, that they can't install all of them. And that's because what appears to be happening is that

Nvidia, who previously did not charge customers until they actually needed its GPUs, is now forcing them to take early receipt and pay them, despite the customers in question, not actually being able to use said GPUs. Now, I know that there are going to be some people who hear this and say, oh, that's very common, oh, they get them in advance anyway, oh, that's totally normal. It's not normal.

It's not normal at all, and anyone acting that way as a bootlicker as I'll get to later, because from what I can tell, it appears that Nvidia is channel stuffing, when a company forces inventory onto its customers prematurely as a means of boosting revenues. Usually, this is done by offering deep discounts in exchange, but in this case, Jensen Huang is using the desperation of hypers against them, and while I'm guessing, I believe that he's saying that if you don't buy them in advance, the GPUs won't be available when you finish the data center, even if that's three to six to 12 months in the future. And this is not the first time we've heard stories like this.

There was a story in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago from, I think, Robbie Wheelan and Catherine Blunt, that said that Neo-Clouds, the coreweaves of the world, that bought AMD GPUs or other competing GPUs, will be put in something called Jensen Jail, which is where all the Nvidia fans wish they could be put with a dog collar around their throat, but also refers to this thing of,

if you piss off Jensen Wong, you don't get your GPUs. The distance between delivery and installation, is so severe. The Business Insider found an email where an engineer said that they saw no clear forecasted path to install an indeterminately sized order of GPUs, and

another saying that Amazon would be taking delivery of $3 billion worth of GPUs every month for the foreseeable future. Now, some will dispute my accusation of channel stuffing, suggesting that hypers are the ones making the early purchases for planning

reasons, but that just doesn't make sense. to me. And the phrase compete more for scarce resources is the tell. Riddle me this, Batman. If Amazon, Google and Microsoft and many other companies do not have the power to plug in the chips or the data centers aren't being built, why are the GPUs scarce? What's making them scarce? If companies cannot install the chips or, put another way, don't need them yet, what is creating the scarcity other than something that Nvidia itself is demanding of its partners. And by the way, what really fucking turns my stomach about all of this is that it means that the increased price of RAM and consumer electronics was a result of an artificial supply chain

crisis created by Jensen Huang pushing NVIDIA's customers to take early delivery of GPUs. And that means building all of these bloody things months in advance of when he needed them, which in turn meant buying out capacity from Micron, SK Hynex and Samsung, and buying hard drives and buying all the things for the server's months, if not years in advance, all to increase revenue growth for Nvidia. Jensen Huang is responsible for making life worse for everyone.

He is a greedy, joyless, soulless oaf of a man, and doing this required him to be a certain kind of low that no money or status or fucking leather jacket can ever fix. Jensen Huang is a piece of shit. Fuck Jensen Huang. Fuck every hyper-scaler CEO too. These scumbags drove up the price of everything so that they could all help Jensen Huang

with his no-it loads refused party and make everyone more money in theory, but really just make Jensen more money and make maybe the RAM companies as well. We did not need him to build all these GPUs. He just wanted to sell them to boost earnings for the beaten raise machine. Everyone who participated in the early shipments of GPUs is a fucking scumbag.

And I know that someone's going to say, well, there's good reason to get them early. No, there's not. There really isn't. I get a month early. I get just beforehand. But if you know this shit isn't turning on for three to six months, fuck you. And I also want to say something to all of the freaks out there who are defensive of these companies and think that any emotion or disgust towards them is an overreaction.

You're a pathetic bootlicker and a bitch and you have you. have the mindset of a peasant. You want to kiss Jensen Huang's asshole. You want Jensen Wong to be your father and your boyfriend. You love him. You love capitalism and you love GPUs. You want to fuck one of them. I know I sound alright. Fuck you. I'm sick of this. I'm sick of having to treat these companies without contempt, to be professional about it. Everything is more expensive now. Everything is worse because of what these people did. And people expect me. And the fact that people can actually in the round, not act with this level of anger, genuinely shocks me. These have global consequences. Unless, of course, you're just someone that loves the market,

you want to kiss the NASDAQ, you want to fuck the New York Stock Exchange. Maybe you're one of those people in the markets all that matters. You're pathetic to me. You're subhuman. If all you care about is the market, if you don't see the effect on real people as a problem, you're just pathetic. And what these people have done is morally reprehensible on top of the already vast damage done, the very existence of generative AI. This destructive, pointless void of an industry has made everything it touches worse, all to prop up the vague dreams and excesses of the wealthiest and most powerful and utterly fucking dull pieces of shit I've ever had the misfortune of witnessing. Everything is more annoying, more expensive and worse on some level because of generative AI,

down to the price of fucking US treasuries. And everyone who aided in the ascent of generative AI should know that they have profited off of making the world worse. As I wrote in this newsletter this week, I believe a divide has emerged that is much, much larger than data centers. There's going to be some questions. People are going to have to answer. How into AI were you? How defensive of the industry were you?

Were you normal about LLMs? Did you talk about them as useful software that you used for something, perhaps you were encoding? Or did you act strangely defensive of them? Did you constantly talk about them? nonstop, did you attack people who weren't sufficiently excited? If you did that, why did you do that? How gullible were you about the financial or technical promises of AI?

How many times did you publish an analysed run rate from Anthropical or Open AI? How many times did your story directly or by proxy defend these companies doing unethical things? How many times did you handwave away the financial or social or socioeconomic problems? how defensive were you of capital and how not defensive were you of regular people and the lives of regular people. Because I personally find it morally objectionable to have helped elevate this industry. And now we know that the pre-sales of GPUs, which ran up the price of basically every consumer electronic, is a direct result of only stock market growth and of only quarterly revenue growth.

I think everyone involved should feel fucking ashamed of themselves. And yet still modern journalism keeps chucking. along, nothing wrong, no problem, put the story in the bag, AI's so big, AI so huge. In any case, the answers to these questions will likely be quite illuminating about the people we meet in the next few years. I don't know when this explodes, you all know that. But I know it will now. I'm sitting here watching another day of blood on Corwe's stock, because everything ultimately comes down to the value of the stocks, because it's not like we know the AI revenues of the hypers. It's not like we know how many GPUs are actually in operation. It's not like really anyone

outside of Eugene Kim, respect Eugene, has really gone to the mat to try and find out whether these things are being warehoused. But now we know, we know that everyone's life got made worse pretty much just to help Nvidia. And the apes and hogs oinking online and beating their chest over every quarterly earnings with Nvidia, I think I'm going to enjoy the first one of those that doesn't go well. And not because I wish harm on anyone, but because I can't wait to see the bootlickers eat shit. I'm just fucking sick of it. And people might say I'm overly emotional, people might say I'm taking this too seriously, but I take hundreds of billions of people's lives being made worse pretty much to help a coterie of GPU sellers feel better about themselves and

beat earnings. I find that disgusting. I'm not going to pull my punches and I'm not going to pretend it doesn't bother me. And if it doesn't bother you, I'm not sure what you fucking care about, but it's clearly not other people. And this is what the show is going to look and sound like. So buckle up. It's going to be fun. And even if LLM somehow survive in some sort of open source form, I think the AI industry as it exists today is being held together through cultism and private equity excess and is rigged to blow and it's going to explode. And the world will be different afterwards, and it's going to be difficult. But I think it will be better. And the way we can all make it better is once it explodes, making it clear to those who overly defended the industry,

who chose Jensen Wong over their fellow man, it's going to be hard to treat those people particularly seriously. And as you well know, I've been taking very, very detailed notes. I'll be back next week. I hope you've enjoyed listening. I love it. you all. I'm Melissa Jeltson, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police rode off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing in disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an I-heart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcast.

available only to IHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts. Search for IHeart True Crime Plus and subscribe today. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency. It does not have body cameras.

It's real. Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. It's raw. And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y'all for fools. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the IHart radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts.

In February of 2024, celebrated illustrator and children's book author Patra Mathers and her husband Michael mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know they had died by suicide. Dear honies, this is goodbye. By the time you get this letter, both Petra and I will be dead. next stop, Wonderland. Why did they do it? And what did it do to the people they left behind? Listen to Death of an Artist on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Black Lit.

October is Black Fiction Month. And the Black Lit podcast explores the minds of Sebo Campbell. How speculative fiction works as you enter into a story with a question. Nisi Shaw. What kind of world would it be if these people had not paris. And Octavia Butler. In science fiction and fantasy, I can do absolutely anything. As they pose the question, what if?

Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network on IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. On recent episodes of The Questlove Show, I chat with Jojo about her music and Wallow 267 about his story, everything in between. Don't invite me to karaoke. I'm going to make it weird. Someone's going to try to sing, leave get out, or too little, too late, or baby it's you. Oh, no. And I'm going to be like, okay, cool. Check out my conversation with JoJo, Walo 267, and more on The Questlove Show.

Listen to the Questlove show on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Peace. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.