Panasonic has said demand for backup batteries is rising quickly, and it is largely driven by the expansion of AI infrastructure that requires stable, continuous power. It has already allocated around 80% of its planned output to existing customers, leaving only a limited share for new buyers attempting to scale systems.
Stop selling stuff you haven’t made yet to people who have no money and haven’t paid. Wtf is wrong with businesses these days?
The point of capitalism isn’t “make a widget/sell the widget/to a customer” anymore, it’s “create market value/sell the value/shareholders are the entire point.” The widgets are just a prop in a way, the customers an abstraction. If it’s making money, if it’s growing above 3.5, we worship it. If it’s growing at thousands of percent, then it’s a god who cannot be stopped. Everything else just supports this - government, social programs, people’s life and death and joy in between - that’s all an abstraction. Shareholder value is the only thing that matters.
This is why we must restrain capitalism with regulation, but it’s too late, it’s metastasized into its final form now.
The point about capitalism has always been being able to live off of property without moving a finger and securing that position with all that you have. What you are seeing is are the dynamics of capitalist class society. The numbers game is itself nothing new, nor anything that has especial depth.
We choose capitalism and we could choose not to do capitalism. So to capital, which comes from this social structure, you are like an abstraction, only because it exists in an less concrete way because it needs intangible property relations. To a fish you are trapped in air while you view fish as being trapped in water.
But the point of the economic critiques known from history is to show exactly this:
There is the numbers economy, the stock market, taxes and money. There is culture, there are political systems (liberalism, fascism) and political skirmishes. Then there is what actually exists in a very clear and tangible way. Schools, cars, machinery, fields of corn, people, their relations and so on.
One creates the other. The abstractions arising from the soil of the “real world” can not strike back and make the real world abstract. That is impossible. Capitalism and capital is not a demon that keeps you from undertaking modifications on the structures that birth it. It possesses no special or poetic qualities.
Why would you think there is anything wrong with them? They now get to scalp people with outrageous prices for the 20% they are selling. If the AI sloppanies pay, they made big sales. If the slop producers producers are unable to pay, they will sell the reserved stuff for normal or even slightly elevated prices. It’s win-win. Basically an excuse for industry wide price-fixing.