Michael Burry and Steve Eisman, the two investors who got famous shorting subprime, have landed on opposite sides of the AI trade after the latest earnings print from NVIDIA Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA).

Eisman, the analyst played by Steve Carell in “The Big Short,” said on the latest episode of his podcast that he is hunting for the crack in the AI story the way he hunted for the crack in subprime, but the tape will not let him.

“I couldn’t make that argument right now because the biggest company on planet earth just reported revenue growth of 85%,” Eisman said.

The same Q1 FY27 print included an $80 billion buyback expansion and a dividend increase to $0.25 per share, giving Nvidia the firepower to aggressively defend its own stock.

Two quarters earlier, the company grew revenue 65%. Hyperscaler capex commitments north of $500 billion in 2026 from Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META) have kept Eisman on the sidelines despite his skepticism.

Burry Doubles Down From The Sidelines

Burry, the investor depicted by Christian Bale in the same film, looked at the same 85% number and reached the opposite conclusion. He likens Nvidia to Cisco Systems Inc (NASDAQ:CSCO) during the dot-com era.

In a May Substack post, Burry cited the company’s $81.6 billion in quarterly revenue while arguing that current demand reflects a training and benchmarking phase that may give way to a less GPU-intensive inference phase.

Put options on Nvidia, Palantir Technologies Inc (NASDAQ:PLTR), the iShares Semiconductor ETF (NASDAQ:SOXX) and Oracle Corp (NYSE:ORCL) occupied roughly 80% of Scion Asset Management’s portfolio by the end of 2025, a concentration that makes this a conviction play rather than a hedge.

Burry deregistered Scion with the SEC late last year to focus on his Cassandra Unchained newsletter, closing the fund just as he was making the call.

Prediction Markets Side With Eisman

Polymarket traders appear to agree with Eisman for now. The “AI bubble burst by” market currently assigns a 25% probability to a burst by Dec. 31, 2026, while a separate contract gives Nvidia a 75% chance of finishing 2026 as the world’s largest company by market cap.

Nvidia’s new RTX Spark chip reveal just sent Intel stock plunging 5% as Jensen Huang expands his AI dominance into consumer PCs.

Nvidia closed last week near $214. Burry’s $115 strike sits roughly 46% below that, but still vastly above the stock’s split-adjusted price of approximately $15 in January 2023.

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