AI First, Reality Last: Case Bank of America

If you ever needed definitive proof that the current tech market is running on pure, uncut delusion, look no further. We have officially reached The Onion levels of corporate comedy, courtesy of a recent leak from inside the hallowed halls of Bank of America.

This entry in my series, AI First, Reality Last, is dedicated to a strategy so incompetent it borders on performance art.

The Formula 1 Fiasco:

Thanks to internal emails leaked to the press, we now have a front-row seat to the panic inside BofA. The bank, in a desperate fit of FOMO, rushed to shovel billions of dollars into Nvidia’s pockets to acquire their "AI Factory" infrastructure. They bought the hype, they bought the chips, and they bought the dream.

There was just one tiny snag. They had absolutely no idea how to turn it on.

The situation got so dire that BofA executives had to go cap-in-hand to Nvidia, begging for a manual on how to use the toy they just bought. One BofA executive summed up their own incompetence with a quote that deserves to be etched onto a tombstone for this entire bubble:

"You sold us a Formula 1 race car, and now you have to help us as local car mechanics drive the race car!"

Read that again. One of the world’s largest financial institutions admits they are "local mechanics" trying to figure out a Formula 1 car. It is the corporate equivalent of a teenager buying a jet engine on eBay and then calling Boeing because they don't know how to tape it to their bicycle.

The World’s Most Expensive Shelfware:

Let’s call this what it is: Shelfware.

In the software world, shelfware is the expensive junk you buy to use up your budget, which then sits gathering dust because nobody knows how to use it. BofA has managed to buy physical shelfware on a billion-dollar scale.

They purchased hardware designed to train Large Language Models. Banks do not need to train LLMs. Banks need secure, regulated, precise inference to process transactions and catch fraud. They bought a particle accelerator to heat up a microwave meal.

While this hardware sits idle, it is:

Wasting electricity: Just keeping the lights on for these racks is an environmental and financial burn.

Depreciating instantly: Nvidia is already pushing their next-gen Rubin chips. Every day BofA spends staring at their idle H100s or Blackwells, the silicon becomes closer to e-waste.

Doing nothing: It has zero utility.

Compliance? What Compliance?:

The most laughable part is the lack of foresight regarding their own industry. BofA operates in one of the most heavily regulated sectors on the planet. You cannot just slap a "black box" AI into a banking workflow without regulators tearing you apart.

They bought the tech before they had a plan to integrate it, before they cleared the compliance hurdles, and before they even had the staff capable of plugging it in. It is "AI First, Reality Last" in its purest form.