These companies are publicly traded…

The people who run/own the AI companies would have been complete idiots to not invest in the hardware companies they were going to make these purchases from before making those purchases.

But 100 million in Seagate stock, then announce you just signed a contract buying up supply.

Your company may overpay, but you personally just made a shit ton of money. Which is the why you want your company to succeed

As a bonus, the news that you’re overpaying to buy up all the hard drives, doesn’t hurt your company it helps it.

There’s no way to monetize it anyways, the product is the stock price. And this move makes the company seem confident, which raises stock price.

That’s not even getting into the long term problem that even if AI fails, were seeing a huge migration in computing power from individuals to private corporations. That’s a big deal even if AI dies tomorrow. And they have a lot of motivation to never let us get it back.