Of course they were. They bought up literally as much as they could manage, because anything they didn't would be bought up by someone else. It's literally a use it or lose it market right now. This is not a problem. Just stockpile it.
Are you sure? The point of this stockpiling was to create that impression. Now that you have data that that foundation behind that impression is manufactured and faked, you need to reconsider everything that was resting on that foundation. The demand is just so incredible needs to be reexamined from scratch now in light of the active attempts to forge that signal.
It is also worth remembering that this is a prime example of a situation that is not black or white. The absolute size of the demand, however large it may be, is not the question. It's the size relative to the supply, supply which includes all the pumping shenanigans that are coming into the light. The "AI bubble" has never been if there is demand or if the tech has real use, it has always been a relative question about if the build out could possibly make economic sense.
edit: i'd willingly bet that AMD has a backroom deal to tank their performance and options to encourage this homogenous deployment overseas. swallow the hook.
You need to apply first-principles thinking to this sort of scenario. Beliefs like the demand is crazy do not just exist floating through space; they exist on top of a specific set of facts and deductions from those facts, which can be very easy to forget when a fact seems to be true for a long period of time. When the set of facts and deductions a conclusion rests on are found to be faulty, the conclusions need to be re-examined from scratch. It is not generally impossible that a fact could still end up being true, just for different reasons.
However in this specific case, it strikes me as extraordinarily unlikely. If the shortage has been manufactured, then all assumptions around demand and possible profitability have to be completely re-examined. Once the system digests this, because these things do take some time, it can cease to be a "use it or lose it" market very, very quickly, and turn incredibly quickly into a "liquidate everything you can while it still has some sort of value" because of massive, massive oversupply. What is the value of a rack of nVidia processors that nobody can turn on? What is the value of a rack of nVidia processors that nobody can turn on when there are warehouses' worth of the things? Anyone who blind operates on "it's a use it or lose it market" will lose their shirts on the transactions. "It's a use it or lose it market" is not a foundation; it is contingent on a lot of things, some of which are being shown to be false.
I look forward to the next R710 where you can just buy enterprise grade servers for a few hundred bucks and as long as you have somewhere to put a hurricane level of noise, you can Just Have terabytes of memory at home. Or many-GPU in this case.
Unless you’re convinced you’re going to be able to build faster than you can buy _in the future_ of further increased AI demand and easy painless data center construction.