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- A data center boss compared AI skeptics to Lex Luthor's monkey army in "Superman."
- Michael Burry of "The Big Short" and short-seller Jim Chanos have been warning about AI spending.
- HIVE's Frank Holmes said the negativity reminded him of Luthor's monkeys churning out vitriol.
A data center executive said the recent backlash against the AI boom, led by the likes of Michael Burry and Jim Chanos, reminded him of Lex Luthor's army of keyboard-bashing monkeys in the newest "Superman" movie.
Frank Holmes, the executive chairman of HIVE Digital Technologies, played a GIF from the movie during the company's earnings webcast last week. It showed one of the monkeys furiously typing the message: "ONLY AN IDIOT WOULD BACK SUPERMAN."
Luthor, Superman's archnemesis, memorably uses the monkeys to flood social media with hateful memes, hashtags, and vitriol. Mimicking real-life troll farms, the disinformation campaign succeeds in turning the world against the hero.
Holmes also flashed up a slide with pictures of Burry and Chanos, followed by another filled with recent news headlines about their warnings.
"Jim Chanos comes out and: 'Short the bitcoin miners, short Nvidia, short the [high-performance computing], the hyperscalers, there's too much debt,'" Holmes said.
"And Michael Burry is coming out," he continued. "He came out a couple weeks ago. Again, he's short this market. And it really starts to grow, this negativity on the ecosystem."
Commenting as the GIF played, Holmes said it was "about Superman's credibility being destroyed."
"Well, the same thing happened out of nowhere, all this negativity was showing up on Instagram, and YouTube, and X," he added.
HIVE builds and runs data centers powered by clean energy in Canada, Sweden, and Paraguay. Holmes dismissed negative news about Big Tech companies spending too much on data centers, saying the "backup demand is just immense," and short-term traders were stirring the pot to help their short bets.
Burry, the fund manager-turned-writer of "The Big Short" fame, reiterated his concerns about AI overinvestment in X posts over the weekend.
A question I have for $ORCL, $GOOG, $META, $MSFT, $AMZN, $NVDA, $CAT, and all the rest, “When does the spending for AI data center buildout actually end?”
It is consuming all your cash flow, you are borrowing, you are financing in ways you never have, apparently because it is so… pic.twitter.com/fytMYDH942
"A question I have for $ORCL, $GOOG, $META, $MSFT, $AMZN, $NVDA, $CAT, and all the rest, "When does the spending for AI data center buildout actually end?" he queried.
"It is consuming all your cash flow, you are borrowing, you are financing in ways you never have, apparently because it is so urgent, because it scales? But if it scales, when does it end?" he added.
Chanos also took to X over the weekend to question whether tech giants would see returns on their huge outlays.
"But are they ALL going to be extremely profitable?" he asked. "Because each one of the AI companies and hyperscalers is spending money like they will be. They are betting that it won't be "winner take all" like search. We'll see."
