The AI Trade is Dead, OpenAI and Anthropic undershot the moon, pressure private equity
u/sfw_supdood ·
Reddit — r/wallstreetbets
· August 24, 2026 at 21:06
· ⬆ 46 pts
· 💬 73 comments
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AI Summary
Summary
Author declares the AI trade dead: LLM token prices are too high, businesses are reverting to subscriptions, and open-source models undermine OpenAI/Anthropic economics.
Thesis: massive AI compute capex will never be repaid, forcing private equity and tech giants to offload shares, leading to a market grind lower and eventual crash.
Positions: late 2027 puts on SNDK, NVDA, PLTR, TQQQ, ORCL; also flags NBIS, MU, and CRWV as possible shorts.
Quality assessment: Speculation/noise — no position screenshot, no quantitative data, and the argument relies on anecdotal industry sentiment.
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For those who don't work in the tech industry, the hype for cutting edge models is already completely dead. We got a taste of what it was capable of with Fable, but it turns out it's mostly just good at making stuff that already exists like Minecraft and Tinder clones. It was kinda neat for the 2 weeks it was freely available on plans, but ultimately none of these businesses are willing to pay ludicris token prices just to use a slightly better model. Companies have already switched back to subscription models, they'd be stupid not to, it's free compute. Even if they were to remove subscriptions entirely, it wouldn't help as people can just switch to open source models instead. It's a no win situation for Anthropic and OpenAI.
This means that the only AI sector that was going for mass compute, LLMs, will definitely not be able to ever pay back all that compute they spent. That's 2.5 trillion down the drain.
This is where you come in 🏳🌈🐻's. Private equity, Softbank, Amazon, Microsoft have to hold this massive bag of debt they spent on these worthless models and they want you to buy them from them. Expect the market to trade sideways or slightly down until this crashes, they are trying to slowly offload shares without crashing the market. Their goal is to hold out until
Positions:
Late 2027 SNDK, NVDA, PLTR, TQQQ, and ORCL puts.
Other good options are NBIS, MU, and CRWV
Author argues LLM compute demand will not pay back AI capex, hitting NVDA’s core growth story. If AI infrastructure spending stalls, NVDA revenue expectations collapse; long-dated puts profit. Bearish bet on AI capex unwind using late 2027 puts. AI spending can persist via government/PE support; top comment says AI stocks may double.
Author ties OpenAI/Anthropic cloud needs to ORCL’s heavy AI infrastructure spending. If AI model demand disappoints, ORCL is left holding costly compute capacity. Long-dated puts express a bearish view on AI cloud capex. Oracle has committed cloud contracts; enterprise demand may remain resilient.
Author implies AI hype-driven software names like PLTR are overvalued if LLM monetization stalls. A de-rating of AI growth expectations would hit PLTR’s valuation hard. Bearish on AI narrative stocks with long-dated puts. Government/defense contracts provide a sticky revenue base for PLTR.
Author expects the overall market to trade sideways or down as AI names drag on indices. Puts on TQQQ allow a leveraged bearish bet on Nasdaq downside without single-name risk. Use TQQQ puts to play the broader AI-led market decline. The Fed/money printer can keep markets melting up; leverage can squeeze shorts.
Author includes SNDK as part of AI hardware/memory exposure that may face demand destruction. If AI compute buildout slows, memory/storage demand weakens, hurting SNDK. Long-dated puts on SNDK are a bearish bet on fading AI hardware demand. Memory cycle can recover on supply discipline, invalidating the short.
This Reddit post, published August 24, 2026,
features u/sfw_supdood
discussing NVDA, ORCL, PLTR, TQQQ, SNDK.
5 trade ideas extracted by AI with direction and confidence scoring.