OpenAI Is A Systemic Risk To The Tech Industry

In the second part of this week’s two-part episode, Ed Zitron walks you through how OpenAI has become a systemic risk, one that may destroy CoreWeave, cost NVIDIA and Oracle billions, and break the back of an ailing tech industry. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:36Speaker 01

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• 1:14Speaker 02

  Call So Media.

• 1:17Ed Zitron?

  Try spinning, that's a good trick.

• 1:28Speaker 04

  Better offline.

• 1:31Ed Zitron?

  I'm Ed Zitron. This is Better Offline and this is the second episode of my two-part series where I explain how OpenAI has become a systemic risk to the tech industry, even with its massive $40 billion funding round, a bird brain benefactor in the form of SoftBank, the world's foremost authority in losing money. Now, before I continue, shameless request, Better Offline has been nominated for a Webby and I want to win this thing. I've linked to it in my Twitter and my Blue Sky and if you could vote for me, well, it'll be in the episode notes too. Moving on, back at it. Okay, alright, OpenAI now has forty billion dollars somehow, right? Great, right? Well, hold your horses. As part of its deal with SoftBank, OpenAI must also convert its bizarre nonprofit

• 2:12Ed Zitron?

  structure into a for-profit entity by December 2025, or it will lose ten billion dollars from that forty billion dollar round of funding. And just to be clear, by the way, they've only really got ten billion dollars of that so far. The rest is at the end of the year. Furthermore, in the event that OpenAI fails to convert into a for-profit company by October 2026, investors in its previous six-point-six-billion-dollar funding round can claw back their investment with it converting into a loan with an attached interest rate. Naturally, this represents a nightmare scenario for the company, as it will increase both its costs and its outgoings. This is a complex situation that almost warrants its own podcast, but the long and short of it is that OpenAI would have to effectively dissolve itself, start the process

• 2:54Ed Zitron?

  of reforming an entirely new entity, and distribute its assets to other nonprofits or sell a license to them to a for-profit company at fair market rates, which they would not set. It would also require valuing OpenAI's assets, which in and of itself would be a difficult task, as well as getting past the necessary state regulators, the IRS, state revenue agencies, and the upcoming trial with Elon Musk. Well, that only adds further problems. I've simplified things here, and that's because, as I've said, this stuff is a little complex and pretty boring. Suffice to say, this isn't as simple as liquidating a company and starting afresh or submitting a couple of legal filings. It's a long, fraught process and one that will be, as has been, subject to legal challenges, both from OpenAI's business rivals, as well as from civil society organizations in California.

• 3:38Ed Zitron?

  You may have heard the lost monologue. Based on discussions with experts in the field and my own research, I simply do not know how OpenAI pulls off this by October 2026, and honestly, I'm not sure how they do it by the end of this year. It's insane. It's a... It's a really...

• 3:56Ed Zitron?

  I just, every time I read this stuff and I write out, I'm like, how is nobody else reading this and going, what the fuck is going on? You see, this is a big problem, this nonprofit thing, because OpenAI really has become a systemic risk to the tech industry and anything that increases that risk is bad news for everybody. OpenAI, they've become a kind of load-bearing company for this industry, both as a narrative, as I've discussed multiple times, as ChatGPT is the only large language model company with any meaningful use base, and also as a financial entity. Its ability to meet its obligations and its future expansion plans are critical to the future health or in some cases, survival of multiple large companies, and that's before the after-effects that will affect its customers as a result of any kind of financial collapse.

• 4:40Ed Zitron?

  The parallels to the 2007 and 2008 financial crisis are starting to become a little worrying. Lehman Brothers wasn't the largest investment bank in the world, although it was pretty big, just like OpenAI isn't the largest tech company, though again, it's certainly large in terms of alleged valuation expenditures. Lehman Brothers' collapse sparked contagion that would later spread throughout the entire global financial services industry and consequently the global economy. Now, I can see OpenAI's failure not having as big an effect, but I can imagine a systemic effect still. You have to realize that the whole AI trade, the narrative, the bubble, it's holding up the economy. I think like 30, 35% of the US stock market is in the magnificent seven and all of their

• 5:25Ed Zitron?

  bullshit numbers right now are held up by this nonsense. And like the financial crisis, the impact in this case won't be limited to just bankers and insurers, it will bleed into everything else. This episode is going to be a bit grim, I'm not going to lie. I want to lay out the direct result of any kind of financial crisis at OpenAI because I don't think anybody is taking this seriously. Let's start with Oracle, who will lose at least a billion dollars if OpenAI doesn't fulfill its obligations. Per the information, Oracle, which has taken responsibility for organising the construction of the Stargate data centres with unproven data centre builder Crusoe, and I quote the information here, may need to raise more capital to fund its data centre ambitions. Oracle has signed a 15-year lease with Crusoe and, to quote the information, is on the

• 6:08Ed Zitron?

  hook for $1 billion in payments to that firm. To further quote the information, "Well, that's the standard deal length, the unprecedented size of the facility Oracle is building for just one customer makes it riskier than a standard cloud data centre used by lots of interchangeable customers with much more predictable needs", according to half a dozen people familiar with these types of deals. In simpler terms, Oracle is building a giant data centre for one customer, OpenAI, and has taken on the financial burden associated with it. If OpenAI fails to expand or lacks the capital to actually pay for its share of the Stargate data centre project, Oracle is on the hook for at least $1 billion, and based on the information's reporting, it's also on the hook to buy the GPUs for the site. This is me quoting them again. "Even before the Stargate announcement, Oracle and OpenAI had agreed to expand their

• 6:52Ed Zitron?

  Abilene deal from two to eight data centre buildings, which can hold 400,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, adding tens of billions of dollars to the cost of the facility." In reality, this development will likely cost tens of billions of dollars, $19 billion of which is due from OpenAI, which does not have the money until it receives its second tranche of funding in December 2025 from SoftBank, and this is contingent partially on their ability to convert into a for-profit entity, which, as mentioned, is extremely difficult and extremely unlikely. It's unclear how many of the Blackwell GPUs that Oracle has had to purchase in advance, but in the event of any kind of financial collapse at OpenAI, Oracle will likely have to toss at least $1 billion, if not several billion dollars. And then we get the core, which is so...

• 7:35Ed Zitron?

  A company whose expansion is likely driven entirely by OpenAI now and cannot survive without OpenAI fulfilling its obligations, if it doesn't die anyway. Now, I've written and spoken a lot about publicly traded AI compute firm CallWeave, and it would give me the greatest pleasure in my life to never think or talk about them ever again, nevertheless I have to. This is my curse. This is my curse. CallWeave has become my curse every time I think about this fuck- Okay. The Financial Times revealed a few weeks ago that CoreWeave's debt payments could balloon to over $2.4 billion a year by the end of 2025, far outstripping its cash reserves. And the information reported that its cash burn would increase to $15 billion in 2025.

• 8:16Ed Zitron?

  As per its IPO filings, 62% of CoreWeave's 2024 revenue, a little under $2 billion with losses amounting to $863 million, was Microsoft compute. And based on the conversations I've had with sources, a good amount of this was Microsoft running compute for OpenAI. Starting October 2025, OpenAI will start paying CoreWeave as part of its five-year-long $12 billion contract, picking up the option that Microsoft declined. This is not great timing, or maybe it's perfect timing, because this is also when CoreWeave will have to start making payments on their massive stupid multi-billion dollar DDTL 2.0 loan, mentioned in previous episodes, but really there's a newsletter. If you wanna you hear me go mad, you wanna read me go mad, you read my read my CoreWeave piece,

• 8:57Ed Zitron?

  because it really drove me insane. Nevertheless, these CoreWeave payments, the ones from OpenAI to CoreWeave that October, they're pretty much critical to CoreWeave's future. This deal also suggests that OpenAI will become CoreWeave's largest customer. Microsoft had previously committed to spending $10 billion on CoreWeave's services by the end of the decade, but CEO Satya Nadella added a few months later on a podcast that its relationship with CoreWeave was a one-time thing. Man, man, they're really like, really fucking around there. Satya don't love CoreWeave. Assuming Microsoft keeps spending at its previous rate, so about 1.66% of $2 billion, whatever that is, something that isn't guaranteed, by the

• 9:39Ed Zitron?

  way, it would still only be half of OpenAI's potential revenue to CoreWeave. CoreWeave's expansion at this point is entirely driven by OpenAI. 77% of its 2024 revenue came from two customers, Microsoft being the largest, and yes, I just fucked up a number, at 62%, and using CoreWeave as auxiliary compute for OpenAI. As a result, the future expansion efforts, the theoretical 1.3 gigawatts of contracted, and by the way, that means it doesn't exist, compute, at CoreWeave are largely, if not entirely, for the benefit of OpenAI. In the event that OpenAI cannot fulfill its obligations, CoreWeave will collapse. It's that fucking simple. And then the shockwaves will ripple further. Nvidia relies on CoreWeave for more than 6% of its revenue, and CoreWeave's future creditworthiness to continue receiving said revenue.

• 10:23Ed Zitron?

  Well, much of that is dependent on OpenAI continuing to buy services from CoreWeave. Now, I'm basing this on a comment I received from the legendary Gil Luria, Managing Director and Head of Technology Research at analysts D.A. Davison and Co. I quote him: "Since CoreWeave bought 200,000 GPUs last year and those systems are around $40,000, we believe CoreWeave spent $8 billion on Nvidia last year. That represents more than 6% of Nvidia's revenue in 2024." He said "last year", but I just wanted to make it sound better. CoreWeave receives preferential access to Nvidia's GPUs, though Nvidia kind of denies that and makes up billions of dollars of Nvidia's revenue. CoreWeave then takes those GPUs and then they raise debt using the GPUs as collateral, as well as customer contracts. Then, they use

• 11:08Ed Zitron?

  the money they've raised to buy more GPUs from Nvidia. You may think, "That doesn't sound right." I am being completely... like, this is factual information at this point. Nvidia was the anchor for CoreWeave's IPO, and CEO Michael Intrater said that the IPO would not have closed without Nvidia buying $250 million worth of their shares. Nvidia also invested $100 million in the early days of CoreWeave's, and for reasons I cannot understand, also agreed to spend $1.3 billion over four years to, and I quote the information, "rent its own chips from CoreWeave." Fun fact: I can't find a single fucking mention of CoreWeave in any of Nvidia's filings. Now, buried in CoreWeave's S1, the document every company publishes before going public,

• 11:50Ed Zitron?

  was a warning about counterparty credit risk, which is when one party provides services or goods to another with specific repayment terms and the other party doesn't meet their side of the deal. While this was written as a theoretical, as it could, and theoretically speaking, come from any company to which CoreWeave acts as a creditor, it only named one: OpenAI.

• 12:11Ed Zitron?

  Now, as discussed previously, CoreWeave is saying that should a customer, any customer, but really they mean OpenAI, fail to pay its bills for infrastructure built on their behalf or services rendered, it could have a material risk to the company. Now, as an aside, the information reported that Google, and someone's gonna email me this, so I just wanted to get ahead of it, that CoreWeave is apparently in advanced talks with Google to rent GPUs. It also, it also added another thing in this story, just so I don't have to hear from any of you. The Google's potential deal with CoreWeave is significantly smaller than their commitments with Microsoft, according to one of the people briefed on it, but could potentially expand in future years. Do not come to me and claim that Google's gonna save CoreWeave. I'll be so mad. Anyway, even with Google and OpenAI's money, CoreWeave's continued ability to do business hinges

• 12:55Ed Zitron?

  heavily on its ability to raise further debt, which I have previously called into question in a newsletter that gave me madness, and its ability to raise future debt is, to quote the Financial Times, "secured against its more than 250,000 Nvidia GPUs and its contracts with customers such as Microsoft." Now, any future debt that CoreWeave raises will be based off of its contract with OpenAI, you know, the counterparty credit risk threat that represents a disproportionate share of its revenue that I just mentioned, and also whatever GPUs they still have left that they can get debt on. As a result, a chunk of Nvidia's future revenue is dependent on OpenAI's ability to fulfill its obligations to CoreWeave, both in its ability to pay them and their timeliness in doing so. If OpenAI fails, then CoreWeave fails, then that hurts Nvidia.

• 13:38Ed Zitron?

  Jensen's gonna have to go, he's gonna have to go to a cheaper leather jacketarium. And it gets worse. OpenAI's expansion is dependent on two unproven startups, one of them I just mentioned, who are also dependent on OpenAI to live. With Microsoft's data center pullback and OpenAI's intent to become independent from Redmond, future data center expansion is based on two partners supporting CoreWeave, I know, will get there, and Oracle. Now, I'm referring, of course, to Core Scientific, which is the data center developer for CoreWeave, and of course Crusoe, who's the data center developer for Oracle. Now, if you were wondering, I kind of hinted about this earlier, how many data center, how many AI data centers do you think Crusoe's ever built? And the answer is, is none.

• 14:22Ed Zitron?

  And Core Scientific, how many do you think they've built? And the answer is also none. These are the fucking companies underpinning the AI boom.

• 14:31Ed Zitron?

  I also really must explain how difficult it is to build a data center and how said difficulty increases when you're building an AI-focused one. For example, Nvidia had to delay the launch of its Blackwell GPUs because of how finicky the associated infrastructure, so the servers and the cooling and such, is for customers. This was for customers that had already been using GPUs and therefore likely knew how to manage the temperatures created by them. Also, as another reminder, OpenAI is on the hook for $19 billion of funding behind Stargate, and neither of them have that money. I just want to remind you of that because it costs so much money to build a fucking data center. And imagine, if you didn't have any experience and effectively had to learn from scratch, how do you think it would be building these data centers?

• 15:14Ed Zitron?

  Let's find out. So let's start in Abilene, Texas with Crusoe and the Stargate Data Center Project. Now Crusoe is a former cryptocurrency mining company that has now raised hundreds of millions of dollars to build data centers for AI companies, starting with a $3.4 billion data center financing deal with asset manager Blue Owl Capital. This yet to be completed data center has now been leased by Oracle, which will allegedly fill it full of GPUs for OpenAI. Despite calling itself, and I quote, "the industry's first vertically-integrated AI infrastructure provider," with the company using flared gas as a waste byproduct of oil production to power IT infrastructure, Crusoe does not appear to have built a single AI data center and is now being tasked with building 1.2 gigawatts of a data center capacity for OpenAI. It's just so fucking...

• 16:00Ed Zitron?

  Crusoe is the sole developer and operator of the Abilene site, meaning according to the information that it is in charge of contracting with construction contractors and data center customers as well as running the data center after it is built. Oracle, it seems, will be responsible for filling said data center with GPUs as mentioned. Nevertheless, the project also appears to be behind schedule. The information reported in October 2024 that Abilene was meant to have 50,000 of Nvidia's Blackwell AI chips in the first quarter of 2025 and also suggested that the site was projected to have a whopping 100,000 of them by the end of 2025. Now, you can join me back here in reality because a report from Bloomberg in March 2025 said that OpenAI and Oracle were expected to have 16,000 available

• 16:42Ed Zitron?

  by the summer of 2025, with and I quote, "OpenAI and Oracle expecting to deploy 64,000 Nvidia GB 200s at the Stargate Data Center by the end of 2026." That's, that's, that's very delayed. That's really delayed. Again, how I run a PR firm and I record a podcast, I write a newsletter, I have a book I'm writing, I got all this shit on it, I'm the asshole who notices this. Anyway, as discussed previously, OpenAI needs this capacity very badly. According to the information, OpenAI expects Stargate to handle three quarters of its compute by 2030, and these delays call into question at the very least whether this schedule is reasonable or logical or even possible. And I actually

• 17:24Ed Zitron?

  really question whether Stargate itself is possible at this point. But it can get dumber because we're about to talk about Core Scientific and they are CoreWeave's friends. They're the people building data centers for CoreWeave in Denton, Texas.

• 17:45Speaker 00

  Empower is all about helping you invest well so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals, and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends, or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money, and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

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• 19:46Ed Zitron?

  Now, as you can probably tell, I've written a great deal about CoreWave in the past. I've got a monologue, I've got a newsletter, and I've got a therapy bill for it. And specifically, I've written about their build-out partner, Core Scientific, a cryptocurrency mining company, yes, another one, that has exactly one customer for its AI data centers. And you'll never guess who it is, it's CoreWave. Now, here's a few fun facts about Core Scientific. Core Scientific was bankrupt last year. Core Scientific has never built an AI data center, and its cryptocurrency mining operations were built around ASICs, specialist computers for mining Bitcoin, which led to an analyst to tell CNBC that said data centers would, and I quote, "need to be bulldozed and built from the ground up to accommodate AI compute." That's the stuff.

• 20:28Ed Zitron?

  Core Scientific also does not appear to have any meaningful AI compute of any kind. Its AI/HPC, which is high-performance computing, revenue represents a teeny, tiny, teeny little percentage of overall revenue, which mostly comes from mining crypto, both for itself and other parties. Now, hearing all of this, would you give this company your compute? Would you think these are the people that I am going to call to build my data centers? If you said no, you are smarter than CoreWave, who has given their entire 1.3 gigawatt build-out to Core Scientific. Core Scientific also, it seems, they seem to be taking on like 1.14 billion dollars of capital expenditures to build these data centers, which, by the way, is not enough money.

• 21:13Ed Zitron?

  But nevertheless, CoreWave has promised to reimburse them 899.3 million of these costs. This is all from public filings, by the way. It's also unclear how Core Scientific actually intends to do any of this shit. While they've taken on a good amount of debt in the past, 550 million dollars in the convertible note towards the end of last year, this would be more debt than they've ever taken on. It also, as with Crusoe, does not appear to have any experience building AI data centers. A point I keep repeating because it's very important, these are the companies behind the growth for OpenAI. Except, unlike Crusoe, Core Scientific is a barely functioning, recently bankrupted Bitcoin miner pretending to be a data center company. Crusoe, on the other hand, is possibly also doing the same thing, but they're less egregious about it.

• 21:56Ed Zitron?

  Now, how important do you think CoreWeave is to OpenAI exactly? Well, that's our semaphore. CoreWeave has been one of our earliest and largest compute partners, OpenAI chief Sam Altman said in CoreWeave's roadshow video, adding that CoreWeave's compute power led to the creation of some of the models that we're best known for. CoreWeave figured out how to innovate on hardware, to innovate on data center construction, and to deliver results very, very quickly. Did it? But even if it did, will it survive long term? Going back to the point of the contagion, if OpenAI fails and CoreWeave fails, so too does Core Scientific, and I don't really fancy Crusoe's chances either. But let's take a step back for a moment. We've been going so hard, haven't we? I've got a genuine question, just for the fact finders out there.

• 22:41Ed Zitron?

  Does Microsoft book OpenAI's compute as revenue? Now, up until fairly recently, Microsoft has been the entire infrastructure backing OpenAI, but recently, to free OpenAI up to work with Oracle and see other people, released it from its exclusive cloud compute deal. Nevertheless, per the information, OpenAI still intends to spend $13 billion on compute on Microsoft Azure this year. What's confusing, however, is whether any of this is booked as revenue for Microsoft. Microsoft claimed earlier in the year that it surpassed $13 billion in annual recurring revenue, by which it means it's last month multiplied by 12, by the way, and they said it was from AI. OpenAI's compute costs in 2024 were $5 billion, and that's at a discounted Azure rate, which

• 23:22Ed Zitron?

  on an annualized basis would be about $416 million in revenue a month for Microsoft. It isn't, however, clear whether Microsoft counts OpenAI's compute as money, which is really fucking weird. You'd think with all this money they're making from this company, they'd be saying there was money coming in. It's peculiar. I've yet to find a real answer. Now, Microsoft's earnings do not include an artificial intelligence section. No, they're made up of three separate segments: productivity and business processes, which includes things like LinkedIn, Microsoft 365, and so on; more personal computing, which includes Windows and gaming products; and then intelligent cloud, including server products and cloud services like Azure, which is likely where OpenAI's compute is included

• 24:03Ed Zitron?

  and where Microsoft would book the revenue from selling access to OpenAI's models, but not OpenAI's compute? Question mark? As a result, it's hard to say specifically where OpenAI's revenue might sit. Even guessing intelligent cloud might not be right. But based on an analysis of Microsoft's Intelligent Cloud segment from financial year 2023 Q1 through its most recent earnings, and there was a spike in revenue from 23 Q1 to 24 Q1. In financial year Q1, which ended on September 30th, 2022, a month before ChatGPT's launch, the segment made $20.3 billion. The following year, in FY24 Q1, it made $24.3 billion, a 19.7% year-over-year growth,

• 24:47Ed Zitron?

  or roughly $4 billion. This could represent the massive increase in training and inference costs associated with hosting ChatGPT, and they peaked at $28.5 billion in revenue in the financial year 24Q4, before dropping dramatically to $24.1 billion in financial year 25Q1, and raising a little to $25.5 billion in financial year 25Q2. I'm so sorry, none of this is easy to read. This is a plausible explanation. OpenAI spent 2023 training its GPT-4O model before transitioning to its massive expensive Orion model, which would eventually become GPT-4.5, as well as its video generating model, Sora. According to the Wall Street Journal, training GPT-4.5 involved at least one training run

• 25:31Ed Zitron?

  costing around half a billion dollars in compute costs alone. These are huge sums, but it's worth noting a couple of things. First, Microsoft licenses OpenAI's models to third parties, so some of this revenue could be from other companies using GPT on Azure. We've seen lots of companies launch AI products, and not all of them are based on LLMs. Muddying things further, Microsoft provides OpenAI access to Azure cloud services at a discounted rate, as I've mentioned in the past. And so there's a giant question mark over OpenAI's actual contribution to the various spikes in revenue for Microsoft's Intelligent Cloud segment, or whether other third parties played a significant role. Furthermore, Microsoft's investment in OpenAI isn't entirely in cold hard cash. Rather, it's provided the company with credits to be redeemed on Azure services, kind of

• 26:15Ed Zitron?

  like Chuck E. Cheese tokens. I'm not entirely sure how this would be represented in accounting terms. If anyone can shed any light on this, please get in touch. Would it be noted as revenue or something else? OpenAI isn't paying Microsoft, or are they? Are they doing the tech equivalent of redeeming air miles? Or have they spent a gift card of Azur? It really isn't obvious. And Microsoft is doing some accounting bullshit here. I'm not suggesting impropriety, not suggesting anything illegal. I'm just saying it's insane that they have this company spending billions of dollars theoretically on their services. And it's just nowhere. Additionally, while equity is often treated as income for tax purposes, as is the case when an employee receives RSUs as part of their compensation package.

• 26:59Ed Zitron?

  Under the existing OpenAI structure, Microsoft isn't actually a shareholder, but rather the owner of profit sharing units. This is a distinction worth noting. These profit sharing units are treated as analogous to equity, or at least in terms of OpenAI's ability to raise capital. But in practice, they aren't the same thing. They don't represent ownership in a company as directly as, for example, a normal share would. They lack the liquidity of a share and the upside they provide, namely dividends, is purely theoretical. Another key difference, when a company goes bankrupt and enters liquidation, shareholders can potentially receive a share of the proceeds after creditors, employees and so on are paid. While that often doesn't happen, as is, as in the liabilities, generally they can exceed the assets of the company in many cases. It's at least theoretically possible.

• 27:43Ed Zitron?

  Given that profit sharing units aren't actual salaries or shares, where does that leave Microsoft? This stuff is confusing and I'm not ashamed to say that I just fucked up a word. And the complicated accounting questions like these are far beyond my understanding. If anyone can shed some light, drop me an email, buzz me on Twitter or Blue Sky, hit me up on Plurk or Garp. Or post on the Better Offline subreddit, someone might take your wallet though. Anyway, back on track. I think it's worth understanding the scale of the OpenAI vortex and how it's distorting the tech investment market. And why, even without having failed, it represents a systemic risk. Without OpenAI, an American startup investment is flat. And even with it, less startups are receiving investment. Crunchbase News reported in early April that North American startup investment spiked

• 28:27Ed Zitron?

  in Q1 due to OpenAI hitting $82 billion. Great, right? Sounds great? This statement sadly has a darker undertone. American startup investment was actually like $42 billion in Q1 2025 when you remove the deal, which is appropriate because none of the money is actually received by OpenAI yet, and at best only $10 billion of it will be received before December 2025. This quarter also included a $3.5 billion investment in worm-like competitors around Anthropic run by Wario Amadei, making the appropriate number of 39.5 billion dollars. Now, this is still an improvement, though a marginal one, over the $37.5 billion raised in Q1 2024. Nevertheless, Crunchbase News also has a far, far darker story.

• 29:10Ed Zitron?

  Deal volume in American startups has begun to collapse, trending downward almost every quarter. While deal volume isn't a direct result of OpenAI's financial condition, the so-called revolution created by OpenAI and other generative AI companies' technology appears to be petering out, and the contagion is starting to impact the wider tech sector. It's important to understand how bleak things are. The future of generative AI rests on OpenAI, and OpenAI's future rests on near impossible financial requirements. I've done my best to make this argument in as objective a tone as possible, regardless of my feelings about the bubble and its associated boosters. OpenAI, as I've said before and argued countless times in interviews and podcasts and newsletters, it's effectively the entire generative AI industry, with its nearest competitor being

• 29:55Ed Zitron?

  less than 5% of its 500 million weekly active users. Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, XAI, they're all rounding errors in the grand scheme of things. But OpenAI's future is dependent, and this is not an opinion, this is an objective fact, on effectively infinite resources in many forms. Let's start with the financial resources. If OpenAI required $40 billion to continue operations this year, it's reasonable to believe it will need at least another $40 billion next year, and based on its internal projections, will need at least $40 billion every single year until 2030, when it claims somehow it will be profitable, and I quote the information with the completion of the Stargate data center project. You may be wondering, how's that possible, Ed? How?

• 30:41Ed Zitron?

  You think the information wrote that down? Fuck no. Jessica Lessin's too busy humiliating people she let go by name on Twitter. Jessica Lessin, I like the information. I think you're a fucking asshole for how you treated your people. Say it on my podcast or say it on Twitter. Anyway, let's keep talking about some of these resources that OpenAI is dealing with. Specifically to compute resources and expansion. OpenAI requires more compute resources than anyone has ever needed and will continue to do so in perpetuity. Building these resources is now dependent on two partners, Core Scientific and Crusoe. Though I've never built a data center, as Microsoft has materially pulled back on data center development and has, as aforementioned, pulled back on two gigawatts of data centers. Slowed or paused, of course, some of its early-stage data center products too,

• 31:26Ed Zitron?

  with TD Cohen's recent analyst report saying that data center pullbacks were, and I quote them, "March 26, 2025, data center channel checks letter because it's so good, driven by the decision to not support incremental OpenAI training workloads." That's the stuff. In simpler terms, OpenAI needs more compute at a time when its lead backer, which has the most GPUs in the world, has specifically walked away from building it. Even in my most optimistic frame of mind, it isn't realistic to believe that Crusoe or Core Scientific can build the data centers necessary for OpenAI's expansion. Even if SoftBank and OpenAI had the money to invest in Stargate today, which they do not, dollars do not change the fabric of reality. Data centers take time to build, requiring concrete, wood, steel and other materials to be manufactured and placed.

• 32:10Ed Zitron?

  And that's after the permitting required to get these deals done. Even if that succeeds, getting the power necessary is a challenge unto itself, to the point that even Oracle, an established and storied cloud compute company, run by a very evil man at one point, to quote the information, "has less experience than its larger rivals in dealing with the utilities to secure power and working with powerful and demanding cloud customers whose plans change frequently." A partner like Crusoe or Core Scientific simply doesn't have the muscle memory or domain expertise that Microsoft has when it comes to building and operating data centers. As a result, it's hard to imagine, even in the best-case scenario, that they're able to match the hunger for compute that OpenAI Now, I want to be clear. I believe OpenAI will still continue to use Microsoft's compute and even expand further into whatever remaining compute Microsoft may have. However,

• 32:55Ed Zitron?

  there is now a hard limit on how much of that there's going to be, both literally and what's physically available and in what Microsoft itself will actually allow OpenAI to use, especially given how unprofitable GPU compute seems to be, based on how every single company that isn't Nvidia loses money running them.

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• 35:25Ed Zitron?

  Really? And we're coming to the end of this, which leads to a question. How does all of this end? Last week, a truly offensive piece of fanfiction framed as a report called AI 2027 went viral, garnering press with the Dvarkesh Podcast and gormless childlike wonder from dope New York Times reporter Kevin Rose. And reporter, I think is a fucking stretch. Its predictions vaguely suggest a theoretical company called Open Brain will invent a self-teaching agent of some sort. It's total bullshit, but it captured the hearts and minds of AI boosters and other people without object permanence because it vaguely suggests that somehow large language models and their associated technology

• 36:06Ed Zitron?

  will become something entirely different. I don't like making predictions like these because the future, especially in our current political climate, is utter chaos. But I will say that I do not see, and I say this with complete objectivity, how any of this bullshit continues. I want to be extremely blunt with the following points as I feel like both members of the media and tech analysts have categorically failed to express how ridiculous things have become. I will be repeating myself, but it's fucking necessary as I need you to understand how untenable things are. SoftBank is putting itself in dire straits simply to fund OpenAI once. This deal threatens its credit rating, with SoftBank having to take on what will be multiple loans to fund this $40 billion round. And

• 36:49Ed Zitron?

  OpenAI will need at least another $40 billion a year later. This is before you consider the other $19 billion that SoftBank has agreed to contribute to the data center project with Stargate, money it does not currently have available. Now, OpenAI has promised nineteen billion dollars to the Stargate data center project two, and again, they do not have it, and they need SoftBank to give it to them. And again, I've said it, and I'll say it again, neither of these companies have the money. The money is not there, and OpenAI needs Stargate to get built to grow much further. I see no way in which OpenAI can continue to raise money at this rate, even if OpenAI

• 37:30Ed Zitron?

  somehow actually receives the forty billion dollars it's been promised, which will require it to become a for-profit entity, which I don't think it can fucking do. While it could theoretically stretch that forty billion dollars to last multiple years, projections say it will burn three hundred and twenty billion dollars in the next five years. Or more likely, I can't see a realistic way in which OpenAI gets the resources it needs to survive. It will need this insane streak of good fortune, the kind of which you only really hear about in Greek epic poems or Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, you know, the more cultured choice. But let's go through them. Somehow SoftBank gets the resources and loses the constraints required to bankroll this company forever. The world's wealthiest entities, those sovereign wealth funds mentioned in the last episode,

• 38:12Ed Zitron?

  Souts and so on, they pick up the slack until OpenAI receive, they receive, they reach profitability, which is a huge assumption. It's also assuming that OpenAI will have enough of these mega wealthy benefactors to provide it with the three hundred and twenty billion dollars they need to reach profitability, which it won't. They'll also need Crusoe and Core Scientific to turn out to be really good at building AI infrastructure, which they've never done before. Which is, that, that's very possible, I'm sure. And then Microsoft will then walk back its walk back on building new AI infrastructure and recommit to tens of billions of dollars of CapEx specifically on AI data centers, and also will give it to OpenAI. And then, of course, Stargate's construction happens faster than expected, and there are

• 38:54Ed Zitron?

  no supply chain issues in terms of labor, building materials, GPUs, and so on. Now, I don't know, I haven't checked the news in the last three weeks, but is there anything going on that might increase the cost of materials? Probably not. Anyway, if those things happen, I'll eat crow. I'm not particularly worried.

• 39:15Ed Zitron?

  In the present conditions, OpenAI is on course to run out of money or run out of compute capacity and it's unclear which will happen first. But what is clear is it's time to wake up. Even in a hysterical bubble where everybody is agreeing that this is the future, OpenAI is currently requiring more money and more compute than is reasonable to acquire. Nobody, nowhere, ever, anywhere, has ever raised as much money as OpenAI needs to. And based on the sheer amount of difficulty that SoftBank is having, raising the funds to meet the lower tranche, the $10 billion one of its commitment, it may not actually be possible for this company to continue. Even with the extremely preferential

• 39:57Ed Zitron?

  payment terms, months-long deferred payments, for example, that OpenAI probably has, at some point, someone will need a dollar. I'll give Sam Altman some fucking credit. He's found many partners to shoulder the burden of the rotten economics of OpenAI, with Microsoft, Oracle, Crusoe, and CoreWeave handling the upfront costs of building the infrastructure, and SoftBank finding the investors for its monstrous, stupid round, and the tech media mostly handling marketing for him, which is really nice. Great job, everybody. He is, however, over-leveraged. OpenAI has never been forced to stand on its own two feet or focus on efficiency. And I believe the constant enabling of this ugly, nonsensical burn rate has doomed this company. OpenAI has acted like it'll always have more money and compute. And that's kind of

• 40:42Ed Zitron?

  because everyone's acted as that would be the case. No one's really called Sam Altman out on his bullshit. There are some people, but really, no one in the mainstream media is bothered. Really, Sam Altman has been enabled. OpenAI, by the way, cannot just make things cheaper at this point, because the money has always been there to make things more expensive, as has the compute to make larger and larger language models that burn billions of dollars a year. This company is not built to reduce its footprint in any way, nor is it built for a future in which it wouldn't have access to infinite resources. Worse still, investors and the media have run cover for the fact that these models don't really do much more than they did a year ago, and for the overall diminishing returns of large language models writ large.

• 41:23Ed Zitron?

  Now, I've had many people attack my work about OpenAI, but none of them, not one of them, nobody, has provided me any real counterpoint to the underlying economic argument I've made since July of last year, that OpenAI is unsustainable. Now, this is likely because there really isn't one, other than OpenAI will continue to raise more money than anybody has ever raised in history in perpetuity, and will somehow turn the least profitable company of all time into a profitable company. This is not a rational argument, it's a religious one. It's a call for faith, and it's disgusting to see well-paid reporters with, I don't know, 150,000

• 42:02Ed Zitron?

  subscribers to their newsletters and a really shitty podcast with a major news outlet constantly just ignore this shit. And I see no greater pale horse of the apocalypse than Microsoft's material pullback on data centers. While the argument might be that Microsoft wants OpenAI to have an independent future, that's fucking laughable when you consider Microsoft's deeply monopolistic tendencies. And for that matter, it owns a massive proportion of OpenAI's pseudo-equity. At one point, Microsoft's portion was valued at 49%, and while additional fundraising has likely diluted Microsoft's stake, it still owns a massive portion of what is, at the very least, if you believe any of this nonsense, the most valuable private startup of all time.

• 42:43Ed Zitron?

  And we're supposed to believe that Microsoft's pullback, which limits OpenAI's access to infrastructure it needs to train and run its models, and thus, as mentioned, represents an existential threat to the company. You meant to believe that this is because of some sort of paternal desire to see OpenAI leave childhood behind, to spread its wings and enter the real world. Are you fucking stupid?

• 43:04Ed Zitron?

  Sorry, I shouldn't be calling people stupid. I shouldn't. I really shouldn't. But I am. More likely, Microsoft got what it needed out of OpenAI, which has reached the limit of the models it can develop, and which Microsoft, by the way, already owns the IP of due to their 2019 funding round. There's probably no reason for Microsoft to make any further significant investments other than just kind of throwing a little cash in there and then I imagine some sort of tax dodge. I'm just guessing. It's also important to note that absolutely nobody other than Nvidia is making any money from generative AI. CoreWeave loses billions of dollars, OpenAI loses billions of dollars, Anthropic loses billions of dollars, and I can't find a single fucking company providing generative AI-powered software that's actually making a profit. The only companies even close to doing so are consultancies providing services

• 43:48Ed Zitron?

  to train and create data for models like Turing and Scale AI, and Scale isn't even fucking profitable. Now, the knock-on effects of OpenAI's collapse will be wide-ranging. Neither CoreWeave nor Crusoe will have tenants for their massive unsustainable operations. And Oracle will have nobody to sell compute to, because they've leased that thing for 15 fucking years for one customer. Who else is gonna take that? Anyway, CoreWeave will likely collapse under the weight of its abominable debt anyway, which will lead to a 6%, 7% or more revenue drop for Nvidia at a time when revenue growth has already begun to slow. On a philosophical level too, OpenAI's health is what keeps this industry alive. OpenAI has truly the only meaningful user base in generative AI, and this entire hype cycle has been driven by its success,

• 44:32Ed Zitron?

  meaning any deterioration or collapse of OpenAI will tell the market what I've been saying for over a year. The generative AI is not the next hypergrowth market, and its underlying economics do not make sense. But look,

• 44:45Ed Zitron?

  I'm not saying this to be a hater. I'm not saying this to be right. This stuff has driven me insane, but I'm not doing it to be a pundit, to be a skeptic, to be a cynic, to be someone that hates because I wanna hate. And I hate them not because I think people like me because I hate them. I hate them because I have brain worms. I have something wrong with me inside my brain that tells me I have to be like this and I have to look at these things and I have to try and find what's going on, otherwise I will be driven mad. Which is why I'll say if something changes, if I'm wrong somehow, I promise you, I will tell you exactly how, exactly why, and what mistakes I made to come to the conclusions I have in this episode

• 45:31Ed Zitron?

  and the episodes before. But I don't believe that my peers in the media will do the same when this collapses. But I promise you that they will be held accountable because all of this abominable waste could have been avoided. Large language models are not on their own the problem. They're tools capable of some outcomes, doing some things, but the problem ultimately are the extrapolations made about their abilities and the unnecessary drive to make them larger, even if said largeness never really amounted to much. Everything that I'm describing is the result of a tech industry, including media and analysts, that refuses to do business with reality, trafficking in ideas and ideology, celebrating victories that have yet to take place, applauding those who have yet to create the things that

• 46:14Ed Zitron?

  they're talking about, cheering on men lying about what's possible so that they can continue to earn billions of dollars and increase their wealth and influence for barely any fucking reason. I understand why others might not have said what I've said. What I am describing is a systemic failure, one at a scale heretofore unseen, one that has involved so many rich and powerful and influential people agreeing to ignore reality, and that'll have crushing impacts for the wider tech ecosystem when it happens. Don't say I didn't warn you.

• 46:54Ed Zitron?

  Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I dot com. You can email me at [email protected] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot where's your ed dot at to visit the Discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 47:59Speaker 00

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