Executives who sell AI chips report that demand for AI chips remains strong. Stopped the presses on that one. Called every journalist in my Rolodex. This changes everything about how we understand executives describing their own product sales.
The word is "valuemaxxing" now. Enterprises spent eighteen months lighting money on fire to build chatbots that hallucinate legal advice, and now they want value. Maximum value. They workshop these terms in boardrooms where nobody has opened Excel since 2019. Some consultant charged $40,000 to add "maxxing" to a PowerPoint slide and everyone nodded like it meant something.
AI chip stocks are volatile because nobody knows if this is the internet or pets.com. Could be either. The executives say demand is "almost unlimited" which is the exact phrase you use when demand is definitely limited but you need retail traders to keep buying before the lockup expires. Almost unlimited is like almost pregnant. You either are or you aren't, and "almost" means you're trying to soften the blow.
The debate continues over whether AI spending will pay off. One side says we're building the future. The other side says we're buying extremely expensive calculators that sometimes make up facts. Both sides agree the stocks should go up, then down, then up again, then down harder, because that's what volatility means and volatility is the only thing we can measure anymore.
Retail traders saw "almost unlimited demand" in the headline and bought calls expiring Friday. They read "volatile" as bullish. They read "debate" as confirmation. They'll read their account statements next week and decide technical analysis failed them again, never considering that executives might have a financial incentive to describe their product pipeline as almost unlimited right before earnings.
The chips will ship. The demand will be almost there. The value will be maxxed. And somewhere, an exec will use the word "robust" in a conference call while his CFO frantically signals to wrap it up.
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