Wall Street learns to short the AI boom

At its 2023 peak, an hour of computing on one of Nvidia's H100 chips rented for something close to $8. By the autumn of 2025 the same hour, on the same hardware, could be had for under $2 on the secondary market, a collapse of roughly three-quarters driven not by any failure of demand but by a glut of capacity that arrived faster than the firms renting the chips had planned for. Then the price turned again: a one-year H100 contract that bottomed near $1.70 last October had clawed back to $2.35 by March, and Nvidia, which sets the weather, is reportedly pushing rental prices up around 20% this year. Compute, in other words, has spent two years behaving less like a strategic asset and more like a commodity, which is to say like something whose price can ruin you.

Wall Street has noticed.