Also time for the quarterly reminder that On the Metal / Oxide and Friends is an excellent podcast if you're into Rust and/or EE. Bryan and co. do such a good job keeping the technical discussions entertaining. Seems like an awesome place to work, too.
> Well, yes, it is: most startups don’t pay income tax because most startups aren’t profitable! Indeed, startups seek investment because they have costs long before they have revenue, let alone gross profit — let alone income. This is by design: profitability is a lagging indicator of product/market fit (the adventure in venture capital is investing long before the business has materialized!).
Venture Capital is one of the greatest engines of growth, and fitting for the vast majority of early stage tech companies, it is interesting to see how changes in business economics may result in niche, differing capital structures. Eg. Companies which sell RL envs have vastly different economics than a food delivery app.
It's the full hardware/firmware stack up to and including VM hypervisor. A complete rack solution, but it's the tailored firmware and integrated hypervisor, networking that sets it apart from another OEM that sells you a full rack solution. Afaik.
B2B/Enterprise datacenter software. Alternative to VMware and the likes. None of their core products are open to the average Joe afaik. There was a post about that sometime back on here.
Enterprise software and hardware, built from the ground up. Definitely not just a VMware alternative, though the end product is virtual instances of course.
We're building racks over here! And all our software is open source.
I'm building my business right now and I'm an engineer on a budget so it's running on a homelab and my intermediate scaling problem is to cluster Mac Minis but if my dreams become real I'd love to have an Oxide rack. Very pie in the sky but I've followed ya'll for a minute and I love what I've read, watched, and seen so far.
I mean, most of the code is open source. With enough enthusiasm and skill, you could probably make a reasonable home-lab out of that code, and some second hand hardware. And yeah, it would not be _hardware-software-co-design_, but it would be better than nothing, plus you will -- for a brief shining moment -- be the only person on planet earth (who is not formally affiliated with Oxide) who has an Oxide home-lab.
You could be a hero. A legend. The internet might even write poems and sing songs about you.
Honestly, right now I'm pretty happy with my Nomad and heterogeneous hardware setup of cobbled together compute. But it's honestly not a bad side project idea.
Before I joined Oxide I did a little fan-boying (as one does) and put together home lab components as best I could. You _could_ tie 3+ mini-PCs together and wrangle omicron into some semblance of working that way. But it would not be pretty.
You'll get a single node control plane that's mostly workable, and be able to spin up VMs all day with it. That's what I did. Additionally, if you want to play with microcontrollers you can install Hubris onto STM32H753ZI dev boards! I have one connected to my TrueNAS server over UART and USBTTY for sensors, power management, and console.
NixOS is the perfect homelab solution. You don't really want an overengineered VM monstrocity - that stuff is only needed to work around coporate process insanities.
A confusing thing about fundraising and dilution is that the new shares don’t take away value from existing shareholders.
If each share is worth $1 at the valuation used in the raise, then an investor adding $100 million gets 100 million shares for it. The shares aren’t taken away from anyone, they're issued in exchange for the capital.
So ideally the dilution is neutral to the value of the equity. In practice this is highly variable because the valuations are fuzzy numbers used for the raise, but you get the idea.
If a company can get the same growth without raising, that would be better because the proportional ownership stays higher. However, the reason companies give equity in exchange for capital is that they need the cash for growth and can’t get it on better terms anywhere else.
That's always struck me as a very idealistic way of looking at dilution.
Another way to look at it, is that it's partly locking in the value of those shares at the time of dilution, effectively reducing the variance of the future value of the existing shares.
As a thought experiment:
If you're holding a lottery ticket that you bought, and someone comes along, says they're going to buy 1,000 lottery tickets, but promises to share any winnings with you pro-rata. You don't really have a choice to say no.
You'd probably be really annoyed, if your ticket is a winning ticket, you split the jackpot and don't even get a life-changing amount of money back for it. If any of theirs wins, you likewise get a modest amount, but you weren't bothered about losing £1.
It's an expectation neutral thought experiment, but reducing variance isn't always wanted!
But that's not how shares work. And companies aren't lotteries.
In your example, the additional 1,000 lottery tickets might add nothing whatsoever to the value of the winning lottery ticket in your hand. It's just not a good metaphor. That's not how buying shares in a company works. Investors don't invest using bearer instruments of totally unknown value. They invest using cash. Cash always adds the value of the cash. That's intrinsic to it being cash.
A much better way to think about it is that you have something in your hand that's worth X dollars and has Y shares. If somebody were to give you X dollars in investment in exchange for Y additionally issued shares, then at the end of that operation the company, by definition, would be worth $2x, and your Y shares would be exactly half of that value, meaning that you start with X and you end with X.
As mentioned, knowing exactly what the company is worth in dollars is a little tricky, but that's the premise, and it completely makes sense.
> You'd probably be really annoyed, if your ticket is a winning ticket, you split the jackpot and don't even get a life-changing amount of money back for it. If any of theirs wins, you likewise get a modest amount, but you weren't bothered about losing £1
Your lottery comparison isn’t logical. I think you’re just repeating the same misunderstanding I was trying to dispel above.
If you want to force the analogy, you would have to imagine a lottery where your win and the investor’s wins are tied together. Either you both win or you both lose. But to make the analogy actually work, you’d have to imagine a lottery where their ticket purchase increase the winnings proportionally.
So in this bad forced lottery analogy, you would have a smaller number of the overall tickets, but the same odds of winning as before and the payout would be the same as before.
You’re making the common mistake of assuming that the company could get the same outcome without taking investment money. It’s common to imagine getting that your 0.1% of a sweet $1 billion IPO without ever getting diluted along the way, but getting a company to that IPO point requires a lot of cash. If a company is lucky enough to have all the cash flow they need to get there then they can do it all without dilution. Most companies need to raise some cash to get there, though.
So raising the money actually lowers your variance of getting a large payout, because the cash is what enables the growth to that liquidity event.
If I have a business and I raise $10M at a $100M valuation for 10% of the company, the people giving me the money really value the business at $90M, their addition of the $10M into the business brings the valuation to $100M.
It's not always exactly like that, 1 for 1, but that's the gist. Without the capital, the business is not worth as much as the valuation at the time of the raise.
New shares take away from existing shareholders in every circumstance except one: that the money raised is invested in a way that durably grows the business in excess of the dilution.
Every story where a company sold for an amount that wiped out employee equity (for example every Bending Spoons acquisition) is because they raised too much and it never materialized into (sufficient) growth.
They’re raising from a position of strength for capital they don’t need. As far as I know, they haven’t published their valuation, but it is very possible they’re giving up little equity. Plus, giving up some equity to meet customer demand is generally a good idea as more revenue means higher valuation.
Taking on debt is MUCH faster and easier way for all shareholders in a startup to end up with $0.
Loans are a lot better when you're in a more stable scenario - lower growth and/or lower risk of implosion due to just being more established.
As well as Oxide is doing, startups are still volatile and taking on debt that might need to restructure or be defaulted can create a lot worse outcome for shareholders than just "we diluted and then stopped growing as much".
Why are they paying taxes if they have a huge order backlog. Expand your production capability. Amazon famously had no profits on paper for many years because of their relentless expansion.
"Paying our taxes" in this kind of context is nearly always shorthand for "filling out our tax returns". That part usually takes a substantial hunk of time. The actual payment process is typically writing a check or entering credit card info, which just takes a few seconds.
Well, in this case it was actually literally paying our taxes. (In the photo, Steve is about to initiate a wire to the IRS.) At our size, it's not a check -- and certainly not a credit card.
As to why we're paying taxes: while tax minimization is certainly a thing (and we have taken advantage of things like R&D tax credits), we're paying taxes because we're profitable.
I guess the question is why not invest those profits to further expand when there are already a backlog of orders to fill.
But on the other hand Huge Congrats being a profitable company! Hardware business is insanely brutal, and having the backlog is great to hear. AMD being investor I hope you guys get Zen 6c and Zen 7c earlier in the future.
A few ideas on why reducing profit by investing into the company might not be their best choice without the new investment round:
Hiring people is hard, takes time, and timing of big sales closing causing income may not line up well enough with the hiring process to offset that income fully.
Their machines are sold for high prices. It’s not small and not cheap. If a buyer pays in a lump sum that can be a big income and Oxide may not be able to time that ideally for tax purposes.
Buying electronics components is funny. Want to buy 1000 units? Price X. Want to buy 100,000 units, price is X/25. But till you can place an order for every component at the 100,000 quantity, you can’t get those price breaks so your cost to manufacture machines is much higher. $400M may let them buy at those bigger quantities and get those price breaks and it may not have been worthwhile to buy inventory at the lower quantity pricing if the investment round was looking to close real soon now. Cash flow is king, and hard, for hardware companies.
Oxide doesn't have the same type of capex opportunities that Amazon had. Amazon had a massive physical footprint to build. Oxide contracts with other companies to produce the actual boards. Most of the inventory of components they have are held in their contractor facilities. So they don't have extra warehouses to build. They could change course and adopt more in-house production. However, I think doing that during the sale of their first model would be unwise.
Congrats! Now it does get tricky - because once you tempt investors with a profit they start worrying about your spending and expect you to keep a profit.
Awesome company, awesome products. I wish they pushed AI less in their socials, like we get it computers and servers means ai workloads. It just devalues their whole image in my opinion. Hope you all do continue to do awesome things and don't become evil.
I think some of that is defensive. They don’t have a GPU or other AI Accelerator story right now. They have to remind people that regular compute is still relevant for all the other stuff around the AI workload.
That said AMD’s participation in this round + heavy hints on the podcast and YouTube suggest they will pursue an GPGPU Compute Sled built around an AMD product.
As the person who runs socials, the idea we push AI on socials doesn’t resonate. I get more feedback around “thank goodness you haven’t pivoted to AI-washing your website/marketing”
I think I was moreso referring to how I started following some of your employees and then my feed became very ai heavy so I removed them. Like the "nonai users get left behind", "you should be token maxing" type of messaging, etc. Sorry to misconstrue marketing with other forms of PR
Well you guys don't talk much on X, which is the center of AI-positive attitudes. I would expect AI-negative response on other social media platforms as they are very prevalent in those spaces, especially on Reddit and Bluesky.
I used to think that Oxide's business model sucks in the face of the hyperscalers. When AWS/GCP/Azure "just works" and is generally reliable and cheap, why would I go through the trouble of buying my own computers? Well the past 5 years have been a constant decline towards more concentration of power, lack of care for their customers, and degradation in quality in general. AI is of course accelerating this decline - selling de-slopped products is now a huge competitive advantage. All the best luck to Oxide.
It's all software in the end. If you plan ahead, it is hard to be completely locked in. I worked for a company, where we had build a data transformation pipeline, and we had GCP and AWS credits, and wanted to use both of them. We built a minimal, high-level library that could be mapped onto both PubSub and SQS (we were transforming the WARC files from the internet archive, in preparation for data analysis). Once we built this, and worked around the near-criminally incompetent design of SQS (e.g. PubSub does compression, batching, and does not send duplicate messages, while you need to all that yourself for SQS), we were able to use both clouds (for free) at the same time, and we were not locked in at all.
In fact, we had a call with some people who worked at GCP, and I (naively, and excitedly) mentioned that our design is simple/minimal and cloud-portable. A miasma of awkwardness fell upon the conversation, and I realized that the reason that the GCP people were so keen to speak to us, was that they were anticipating, that once we used up the credits, that they would then get regular recurring revenue from the company.
Most cloud companies are in the business of locking you in via very convenient APIs, that would be costly to migrate off of, if you did not abstract them away to begin with (naturally, the egress costs cannot be abstracted away, but those were not much of a problem in our case, because our output-data was very small compared to the input-data).
There is an expression in my native language: he who lacks virtue in the head, has virtue in the legs.
IBM still does a bunch of stuff, mainly in the research area. They just don't sell netvista/aptiva computers and ibm laptops since like 2005 or so. They still develop and sell mainframes though.
With the major issues with the big cloud providers these days as well as high costs, I’d say there’s a decent shot. Their investors certainly think so.
We're racking hardware right now to move off the cloud providers and but it's just a (small tens-of-millions-of-dollars) test run to start so we didn't want to complicate things by learning anything Oxide-specific, but they are certainly on the radar as the vendor for a larger rollout.
I wanted to work at Oxide until I realized I would not be a fit for yall's culture.
I could not work at a place where I would be corrected for praise of an accomplishment or working under the fear of misapplying a generally accepted term. The inability to include those who have different opinions by accepting different accents or euphemisms.
Exactly, no pricing page. Not worth my time to get involved in contract negotiation as a dev when all I want to know is if it's even feasible to try out.
I'm surprised they didn't go the debt route, trade finance could cover their customer orders. I know they are risk averse in case companies back out of orders, but bringing on more shareholders is its own form of risk.
Is something else going on here, are they locking in orders from AMD and other suppliers beyond their current order backlog?
This is a crazy take. If you can raise on good terms (or better) then it almost always beats debt. Debt can make it a lot harder to raise or take on more debt in the future.
They're profitable, they are going to get the best terms possible at this moment.
They can likely fund the purchase orders for 10% while they grow. Sounds cheaper than giving away a percent of all future profits. This is very common.
That would mean they would be growing slower. Being common is irrelevant.
Raising a Series D is an attempt to permanently increase the velocity of their enterprise. The change in the cap table is negligible if they succeed.
Raising debt right now would be a massive unforced error given they were able to shore up half a billion dollars in funding. If the funding well were dry then it'd be a different story, but that's not the case.
They said they are profitable aside from funding purchase orders, they don't need capital to fund growth. If they said they raised in order to grow faster and that they were not profitable then I would agree with you.
But if they're just scaling inventory, debt makes way more sense because they payoff is almost instant as soon as they fulfill the order to the customer. I agree the math is hazier when you're talking about massive capex, growing headcount, or other longer-horizon capital commitments. But if they just need to buy inputs to sell output to complete an order backlog, selling a portion of the company seems odd.
The people running the company are people who lived through the tech crash, and saw how quickly the entire economy around them can evaporate. At Sun, only slightly exaggerating, they went from flying high and controlling a market segment, to seeing all the demand evaporate and customers vanish, leaving the company holding the bag on just massive piles of inventory, basically in a day.
When you sell shovels, even slight downturns are massively exaggerated because the shovels can be resold, and if some of their customers go under, it's not just that demand that goes away, it's all the demand that can be satisfied by their customers purchasing second hand servers from the bankruptcies instead.
No-one can really say how long this bubble will last. Might pop tomorrow, might be a decade. But if Oxide funds inventory on debt, and the bubble pops, they go with it. Whereas if they fund on equity, and it pops, they will come out the other side just fine. The cost of this is that the old stockholders have a slightly lower upside.
Debt can bankrupt you, equity can’t. They’re concerned the meme companies will collapse, cancel their orders and then kill them. Then mr bezos will turn up and liquidate their assets.
Or… they could just take on equity investment at no risk.
you still need pure compute when doing the agentic ai dance.
you certainly need gpu for inference purposes, but everything else (harnesses, tools, mcps and the actual software) still runs on regular cpus with regular ram and storing data on regular disks.
No GPU support is a hard sell for people who latch onto buzzwords and media narratives without actually understanding technology. CPUs are not going anywhere.
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[ 0.10 ms ] story [ 11.3 ms ] thread- Series C in Feb 2026 $200M
- Series D now $445M
I expect the next round soon :)
Venture Capital is one of the greatest engines of growth, and fitting for the vast majority of early stage tech companies, it is interesting to see how changes in business economics may result in niche, differing capital structures. Eg. Companies which sell RL envs have vastly different economics than a food delivery app.
Oxide continues to be one of the most inspiring companies in the space, I was just encouraging someone to apply there yesterday. :)
We're building racks over here! And all our software is open source.
Their product is a bunch of servers in a rack designed to run that open source software.
But you can run most of their software yourself.
You could be a hero. A legend. The internet might even write poems and sing songs about you.
However! You absolutely can use non-simulated Omicron: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/omicron/blob/main/docs/how-...
You'll get a single node control plane that's mostly workable, and be able to spin up VMs all day with it. That's what I did. Additionally, if you want to play with microcontrollers you can install Hubris onto STM32H753ZI dev boards! I have one connected to my TrueNAS server over UART and USBTTY for sensors, power management, and console.
I want something like a Synology for the drives, but with something like a Mac Mini for the computer. Ubuntu or similar.
I’ll keep dreaming.
I have had the older version of it for almost 10 years now.
it’s not perfect, i need to run more on the synology than is ideal for containerized reliability reasons, but it’s acceptable for personal stuff
If each share is worth $1 at the valuation used in the raise, then an investor adding $100 million gets 100 million shares for it. The shares aren’t taken away from anyone, they're issued in exchange for the capital.
So ideally the dilution is neutral to the value of the equity. In practice this is highly variable because the valuations are fuzzy numbers used for the raise, but you get the idea.
If a company can get the same growth without raising, that would be better because the proportional ownership stays higher. However, the reason companies give equity in exchange for capital is that they need the cash for growth and can’t get it on better terms anywhere else.
Another way to look at it, is that it's partly locking in the value of those shares at the time of dilution, effectively reducing the variance of the future value of the existing shares.
As a thought experiment:
If you're holding a lottery ticket that you bought, and someone comes along, says they're going to buy 1,000 lottery tickets, but promises to share any winnings with you pro-rata. You don't really have a choice to say no.
You'd probably be really annoyed, if your ticket is a winning ticket, you split the jackpot and don't even get a life-changing amount of money back for it. If any of theirs wins, you likewise get a modest amount, but you weren't bothered about losing £1.
It's an expectation neutral thought experiment, but reducing variance isn't always wanted!
In your example, the additional 1,000 lottery tickets might add nothing whatsoever to the value of the winning lottery ticket in your hand. It's just not a good metaphor. That's not how buying shares in a company works. Investors don't invest using bearer instruments of totally unknown value. They invest using cash. Cash always adds the value of the cash. That's intrinsic to it being cash.
A much better way to think about it is that you have something in your hand that's worth X dollars and has Y shares. If somebody were to give you X dollars in investment in exchange for Y additionally issued shares, then at the end of that operation the company, by definition, would be worth $2x, and your Y shares would be exactly half of that value, meaning that you start with X and you end with X.
As mentioned, knowing exactly what the company is worth in dollars is a little tricky, but that's the premise, and it completely makes sense.
They add greatly to your expected chance of winning, given you have pooled winnings.
You can have equal or even increased expectated value and still be unhappy, which was my entire point.
People aren't rational economic maximisers, despite what economics 101 might tell you.
Your lottery comparison isn’t logical. I think you’re just repeating the same misunderstanding I was trying to dispel above.
If you want to force the analogy, you would have to imagine a lottery where your win and the investor’s wins are tied together. Either you both win or you both lose. But to make the analogy actually work, you’d have to imagine a lottery where their ticket purchase increase the winnings proportionally.
So in this bad forced lottery analogy, you would have a smaller number of the overall tickets, but the same odds of winning as before and the payout would be the same as before.
You’re making the common mistake of assuming that the company could get the same outcome without taking investment money. It’s common to imagine getting that your 0.1% of a sweet $1 billion IPO without ever getting diluted along the way, but getting a company to that IPO point requires a lot of cash. If a company is lucky enough to have all the cash flow they need to get there then they can do it all without dilution. Most companies need to raise some cash to get there, though.
So raising the money actually lowers your variance of getting a large payout, because the cash is what enables the growth to that liquidity event.
Yes, which makes the lottery comparison moot.
If I have a business and I raise $10M at a $100M valuation for 10% of the company, the people giving me the money really value the business at $90M, their addition of the $10M into the business brings the valuation to $100M.
It's not always exactly like that, 1 for 1, but that's the gist. Without the capital, the business is not worth as much as the valuation at the time of the raise.
Every story where a company sold for an amount that wiped out employee equity (for example every Bending Spoons acquisition) is because they raised too much and it never materialized into (sufficient) growth.
Loans are a lot better when you're in a more stable scenario - lower growth and/or lower risk of implosion due to just being more established.
As well as Oxide is doing, startups are still volatile and taking on debt that might need to restructure or be defaulted can create a lot worse outcome for shareholders than just "we diluted and then stopped growing as much".
Oxide are so good at comms.
Why are they paying taxes if they have a huge order backlog. Expand your production capability. Amazon famously had no profits on paper for many years because of their relentless expansion.
"Paying our taxes" in this kind of context is nearly always shorthand for "filling out our tax returns". That part usually takes a substantial hunk of time. The actual payment process is typically writing a check or entering credit card info, which just takes a few seconds.
As to why we're paying taxes: while tax minimization is certainly a thing (and we have taken advantage of things like R&D tax credits), we're paying taxes because we're profitable.
"Compensation Everyone at Oxide makes $275,000 USD, regardless of location."
I guess the question is why not invest those profits to further expand when there are already a backlog of orders to fill.
But on the other hand Huge Congrats being a profitable company! Hardware business is insanely brutal, and having the backlog is great to hear. AMD being investor I hope you guys get Zen 6c and Zen 7c earlier in the future.
Hiring people is hard, takes time, and timing of big sales closing causing income may not line up well enough with the hiring process to offset that income fully.
Their machines are sold for high prices. It’s not small and not cheap. If a buyer pays in a lump sum that can be a big income and Oxide may not be able to time that ideally for tax purposes.
Buying electronics components is funny. Want to buy 1000 units? Price X. Want to buy 100,000 units, price is X/25. But till you can place an order for every component at the 100,000 quantity, you can’t get those price breaks so your cost to manufacture machines is much higher. $400M may let them buy at those bigger quantities and get those price breaks and it may not have been worthwhile to buy inventory at the lower quantity pricing if the investment round was looking to close real soon now. Cash flow is king, and hard, for hardware companies.
That said AMD’s participation in this round + heavy hints on the podcast and YouTube suggest they will pursue an GPGPU Compute Sled built around an AMD product.
As the person who runs socials, the idea we push AI on socials doesn’t resonate. I get more feedback around “thank goodness you haven’t pivoted to AI-washing your website/marketing”
I used to think that Oxide's business model sucks in the face of the hyperscalers. When AWS/GCP/Azure "just works" and is generally reliable and cheap, why would I go through the trouble of buying my own computers? Well the past 5 years have been a constant decline towards more concentration of power, lack of care for their customers, and degradation in quality in general. AI is of course accelerating this decline - selling de-slopped products is now a huge competitive advantage. All the best luck to Oxide.
Timestamped to "the differentiator" (15:45) and "what are you guys doing about GPU?".
a few days ago I migrated a non-trivial firestore app to sqlite
10x less latency (10x requests / second)
migration took a few minutes (+ 2 days of prep)
just a few months ago that would have been infeasible or at least nerve wracking
In fact, we had a call with some people who worked at GCP, and I (naively, and excitedly) mentioned that our design is simple/minimal and cloud-portable. A miasma of awkwardness fell upon the conversation, and I realized that the reason that the GCP people were so keen to speak to us, was that they were anticipating, that once we used up the credits, that they would then get regular recurring revenue from the company.
Most cloud companies are in the business of locking you in via very convenient APIs, that would be costly to migrate off of, if you did not abstract them away to begin with (naturally, the egress costs cannot be abstracted away, but those were not much of a problem in our case, because our output-data was very small compared to the input-data).
There is an expression in my native language: he who lacks virtue in the head, has virtue in the legs.
Wake me up please
IBM is more than 100 years old and has brought us a lot of innovations of the modern era.
To give a trivial example the relational model for databases was theorized by F. Codd while working at IBM Research (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Relational_Model_of_Data_for... for further details)
IBM still does a bunch of stuff, mainly in the research area. They just don't sell netvista/aptiva computers and ibm laptops since like 2005 or so. They still develop and sell mainframes though.
I could not work at a place where I would be corrected for praise of an accomplishment or working under the fear of misapplying a generally accepted term. The inability to include those who have different opinions by accepting different accents or euphemisms.
this is political grand-standing or political correctness that leads to nowhere.
did I precede my statement with I'm a black cis-gendered man who likes women and more women ?
honestly some things have to stop.
Look in the mirror Xir Pot.
>To the extent that this thread repels people like you from applying to Oxide, I'd consider it a success.
Not everyone is as bigoted as you.
Is something else going on here, are they locking in orders from AMD and other suppliers beyond their current order backlog?
They're profitable, they are going to get the best terms possible at this moment.
Raising a Series D is an attempt to permanently increase the velocity of their enterprise. The change in the cap table is negligible if they succeed.
Raising debt right now would be a massive unforced error given they were able to shore up half a billion dollars in funding. If the funding well were dry then it'd be a different story, but that's not the case.
Can you imagine if they raised $445M of debt?
Yes, it wouldn’t even be a headline. “Profitable company sells bonds, water is wet, news at 10.”
When you sell shovels, even slight downturns are massively exaggerated because the shovels can be resold, and if some of their customers go under, it's not just that demand that goes away, it's all the demand that can be satisfied by their customers purchasing second hand servers from the bankruptcies instead.
No-one can really say how long this bubble will last. Might pop tomorrow, might be a decade. But if Oxide funds inventory on debt, and the bubble pops, they go with it. Whereas if they fund on equity, and it pops, they will come out the other side just fine. The cost of this is that the old stockholders have a slightly lower upside.
Or… they could just take on equity investment at no risk.
Continued rounds for a decade really blows as an employee.
you still need pure compute when doing the agentic ai dance.
you certainly need gpu for inference purposes, but everything else (harnesses, tools, mcps and the actual software) still runs on regular cpus with regular ram and storing data on regular disks.
No GPU support is a hard sell for people who latch onto buzzwords and media narratives without actually understanding technology. CPUs are not going anywhere.
Hoping they hire for a position in my area of expertise some day!