Evan Conrad: Most AI startups won't be able to buy compute within 6 months
evanjconrad · x · 2026-10-23
Evan Conrad warns of a coming "credit crunch" for compute: the world's GPUs are sold out, and within 6 months most AI startups won't be able to buy capacity.
Key points:
- New clusters demand investment-grade tenants; startups aren't, and are being asked for ever-larger upfront payments — up to 100% of contract value
- Remaining investment-grade tenants are getting down-rated while their token buyers are non-investment-grade: the credit bottleneck
- Inference providers can look creditworthy on high margins (B300 at $6/hr vs $30/hr of inference revenue), but arbitrage and rising GPU prices will compress those margins
- Once token buyers must be investment-grade too, building a startup in any industry becomes structurally harder: credit → tokens → better products → more money
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