The AI Money Trap, Part Two

In part two of this week's two-part Better Offline, Ed Zitron walks you through how America’s economic growth has become dependent on Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta’s AI capital expenditures - and how this inevitably harms both the economy and our markets. Better Offline listener deal: Get $15 Off Where's Your Ed At Premium! Deal goes until the end of August. https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/better-offline-discount YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. BUY A LIMITED EDITION BETTER OFFLINE CHALLENGE COIN! https://cottonbureau.com/p/XSH74N/challenge-coin/better-offline-challenge-coin#/29269226/gold-metal-1.75in --- 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 See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:46Speaker 03

  Call Zone Media.

• 1:48Ed Zitron?

  Hi, I'm Ed Zitron and this is the second part of this week's Better Offline.

• 2:05Ed Zitron?

  As ever, go to the episode notes, buy some merch, get the challenge coins, subscribe to my newsletter. If you like it, go premium. Either way, you've got this episode for free if you can stand the ads, which many of you can. Anyway, the thrust of this two-parter is that the AI trade is going to, as you've probably guessed by now, end badly. And as I'll also explain, I believe we're now set up for potentially economic and market wrecking consequences of this hysterical investment bubble. Today, we're going to go beyond just startups and into how the poison of the bubble has crept into our economy and how dangerous things are getting as a result. In the first installment, we talked about Cursor, the AI coding startup that, despite having no mode and zero sustainability, has somehow earned a valuation of $10 billion.

• 2:48Ed Zitron?

  And then asked why none of these generative AI companies are being acquired, at least not in the traditional sense. And no, I'm not including the acquisitions where a big company snags the talent and leaves barely breathing bodies of startups in their wake. This matters because if these AI companies can't get an exit, go public or get bought, it raises serious questions about how any of this ends. Cursor is the best example, and the fact that Anthropic is hopelessly dependent on Cursor for revenue, despite doing everything they can to kill it, makes the entire situation feel a little bit weird.

• 3:19Ed Zitron?

  Cursor's paths to viability seem frankly to be nonexistent, and the collapse of Cursor will inevitably result in a vast chunk of Anthropic's revenues going up in smoke, which again will also make its collapse seem inevitable, as how can it fundraise an evaluation over its previous one when its biggest customer just died? So much of what I'm describing is structural, and few companies have bigger structural obstacles to survival than OpenAI. As a reminder, OpenAI appears to have burned at least $10 billion in the last two months. It has just raised another $8.3 billion after raising $10 billion in June, according to the New York Times, and intends to receive around $22.5 billion by the end of the year from SoftBank. And that is assuming it becomes a for-profit entity by the end of the year. And if that doesn't happen,

• 4:01Ed Zitron?

  the round gets cut to $20 billion total, meaning that SoftBank would only be on the hook for a further $1.7 billion. I am repeating myself and I need you to really get this. OpenAI just got $10 billion in June. Just in June and had to raise another 8.3 billion dollars in August and that is an unbelievable cash burn, one dwarfing any startup in history, rivaled only by XAI, makers of Grok, the racist Della Lem, which loses over a billion dollars a month. I should also be clear that if OpenAI does not convert to a for-profit, there is no path forward. To continue raising capital, OpenAI must have the promise of an IPO. It must go public because at a valuation of 300 billion dollars or more, OpenAI can no longer be acquired because nobody has that much money and, if let's be real, nobody

• 4:46Ed Zitron?

  actually believes OpenAI is worth that much. The only way to prove that anybody does is to take OpenAI public and that will be impossible if it cannot convert. And ironically, SoftBank's large and late-stage participation makes exits actually harder as early investors will see their holdings diluted as a percentage of total equity, or whatever the hell we're calling it because these aren't real equity shares, they're profit participation units, they're a nonprofit, you can't do stock in them. While a normal company could just issue equity and deal with the dilution that way, OpenAI's structure necessitates a negotiation where companies can obstruct the entire process if they see fit. Speaking of companies doing that, let's talk about Microsoft. As I asked in my premium newsletter a few weeks ago, what if Microsoft does not want OpenAI to convert?

• 5:31Ed Zitron?

  They own all the IP, they own all the access to OpenAI's research and already run most of their infrastructure. While assuming a best-case scenario that it would end up owning a massive chunk of the biggest tech startup of all time, and I'm talking about equity, not OpenAI's current profit-sharing units, Microsoft might also believe that it stands to gain more by letting OpenAI die and assuming its role in the AI ecosystem. But let's assume that OpenAI converts and now has to continue raising money at a rate that will require it allegedly to only need to raise 17 billion dollars in 2027. That number doesn't make any sense considering that OpenAI already had to bring forward its 8.3 billion dollar fund raised by at least three months. But let's stick with that

• 6:12Ed Zitron?

  idea. OpenAI believes it will be profitable somehow by 2030 and even if we assume that, that means it intends to burn over 100 billion dollars total to get there. Is the plan to take OpenAI public and then dump a toxic ax there onto the public markets? Then it will just flounder and convulse and die for everybody to see, kind of sucks. Can you imagine OpenAI's S1? How well do you think this company would do? When they had a true financial audit from a major accounting firm, and you can claim they already have one, I simply don't believe you. This burn does not seem like an accountancy firm would be good with them. And if you want to know what all that looks like, Google WeWork, which went from tech industry darling to joke in a matter of days, in part because it was forced to disclose

• 6:56Ed Zitron?

  how bad things actually were when they filed to go public. No, really, I'll link to an article I've linked in the spreadsheet called "The strangest and most alarming things in WeWork's IPO filing." It's a bad sign if your IPO filing is described as strange and alarming. Those are not even terms of art, they're just worrisome. With that in mind, I feel the same way about Anthropic. Nobody is buying this company $170 billion, which is how much it's raising it right now, and thus the only way to access liquidity would be to take Anthropic public and show the world how a company that made $72 million in January and more than $400 million in July 2025 and also plans to lose $3 billion or more. And then you show them that and let the market decide an affair price, especially if the

• 7:38Ed Zitron?

  S1 includes a bunch of strange and alarming stuff that raises questions about whether Anthropic's value is actually justified. I'm, I'm stuttering here because everyone's acting like these are rational things, like, yeah, OpenAI, which burns $5 billion in 2024, probably 10 or more in 2025, if not 15 or 20, like, that's fine, like, this is all good, they'll just go public one day, will they? Real, really, will they? No, really, what's the plan? What's the plan here? Because the arguments against my work always come down to costs will go down and these products will become essential. Outside of ChatGPT, there's no real proof that these products are anything remotely essential, and I'd argue there's very little about ChatGPT that Microsoft couldn't provide

• 8:22Ed Zitron?

  with rate limits via Copilot. I'd also argue that essential is a very subjective term. Essential in the sense that some people use it as search doesn't mean it's useful for enterprises, or the majority of people, or could not be replaced by anything else. And I guess ChatGPT somehow makes $1 billion a month in revenue selling access to premium versions of ChatGPT, though I'm not 100% sure how. Assuming it has 20 million customers paying 20 bucks a month, that's $400 million a month, then 5 million business customers paying an average of $100 a month each, that's $900 million. And is that, is that really indicative? Is the average really that good? Are there that many people paying thirty five or fifty or two hundred bucks a month? How many of those versus a hundred bucks?

• 9:07Ed Zitron?

  I mean, most don't pay a hundred bucks. It's either thirty five, fifty or two hundred. OpenAI doesn't break out the actual revenues behind these numbers for a reason. I believe that reason is they don't look as good. I also, by the way, when I was fucking around trying to play with GPT five, I got offered a team's subscription for a dollar for one month.

• 9:27Ed Zitron?

  How, how's, how many people? How many of those business customers got a month for a dollar? How long does OpenAI count a customer? What is OpenAI's churn like? And does it really? As I wrote in my newsletter, how much money do OpenAI and Anthropic make? In the year, making more than Spotify at one point five billion dollars a month? We don't know. And OpenAI, much like Anthropic, has never shared actual revenues, other than in June, when they said ten billion annualized revenue, choosing instead to leak to the media and hope to obfuscate the actual amounts of money being spent on its services. Anyway, long story short, these companies are unprofitable with no end in sight, don't even make that much money in most cases, and are valued more than anybody would ever buy them for. And they don't even have that much in the way of valuable IP.

• 10:10Ed Zitron?

  And on top of that, the two biggest players burn billions of dollars more than they make, serving these companies that also burn billions of dollars. I wish someone would make this make sense, because it doesn't. But Ed, the government will give them more money forever. They'll bail them out. I'm tired of this fucking point. I'm so tired of hearing about bailouts. I'm so tired of people saying they'll bail them out. I get that you're scared. I get that things are grim. Things are absolutely fucking grim, but engage with reality here. You can't bail this out. You can't bail it out. Even if this were gonna happen, and it will not, who would they give the money to and for how long? Would they give it to all AI startups? Is every startup gonna get a paycheck protection program for generative AI?

• 10:54Ed Zitron?

  How would that play out in rural red districts where big tech has never been popular, which are being hit with both massive cuts to welfare, as well as the shockwaves of betrayed water has made American agricultural exports like feedstocks, which previously went to China by shiploads, less appealing worldwide? So they... Just in this scenario, by the way, bail out OpenAI, then stuff it full of government contracts to the tune of, what, fifteen billion dollars a year? Right? Like, just in this example. Just to be clear, that's the low end of what this would take to do. And they'll have to keep doing it forever until Sam Altman can build enough data centers to, what, keep earning billions of dollars? There's no plan to make this profitable. Say this happens. It won't, but say it. Now what? America has a bullshit generative AI company attached to it.

• 11:39Ed Zitron?

  Attached to the state that doesn't really innovate and doesn't really matter in any meaningful way, except that it owns a bunch of data centers. Which it doesn't yet, by the way. Microsoft owns all their infrastructure. The Corby stuff is barely happening. Fucking hell. I just don't think this happens. I think it's a silly idea and the most likely situation would be that Microsoft would unhinge its jaw and swallow OpenAI and its customers whole. Hey, hey, hey, did you know, by the way, the Microsoft data center construction is down year over year and it's basically signed no new data center leases? I wonder why it isn't building these new data centers for OpenAI? Could be anything. By the way, Stargate isn't saving them either. As I've written recently, Stargate doesn't actually exist beyond the media hype it generated. And every single person who wrote big articles about Stargate being real and Stargate being

• 12:22Ed Zitron?

  connected to Abilene, Texas, should be fucking ashamed of themselves. It's deeply unprofessional. Anyway, that also counts the hint of the involvement. There are several articles that hint without directly saying that Abilene, Texas was part of the SoftBank-Stargate thing. You can't wriggle out of this one. When the time comes, all will be add. By which I mean, I'm going to be pointing at the articles aggressively. We have other stuff to do. Anyway, by the way, does the government do this for everybody? This very important question. Is everyone getting bail out? Is it just Anthropic and OpenAI? What about Google and Microsoft? They're going to be burning a bunch of money. Why do they get the money and no one else? What other industries are going to turn around and go, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait? Why do I have to fucking make money when, what's the point of this?

• 13:07Ed Zitron?

  Because AI is important? You're going to get a bunch of fraud if this happens? It's not going to, just to be clear. And what is the limit, by the way? Do they subsidize or compute for companies like Cursor? To what end? Where's the limit? How does it end? What is the bailout? What are you bailing out? Where does the bailout go? These are all questions that would get answered. You can, you can sit there and say, oh, the government's corrupt. Oh, I feel this way and that way. Here's the thing. TARP, which is the thing that was used to bail out banks and such and hedge funds and during that whole situation, at least made more sense because if a bank fails, people lose actual money. If this stuff fails, what do people lose? What is the service that people lose access to? ChatGPT? That's it?

• 13:50Ed Zitron?

  I don't even think that Donald Trump could explain what ChatGPT is. And even then, he already has people to give him money. Like, these people don't have anything to offer, other than just this vague sense of AI is important. I just, I just don't buy it. And I think that people, if you're worried to get hopeful, I don't know. I'm hopeful that something's going to explode within this terrible fucking industry. And I'm kind of hopeful because I think it's time to ask a basic question, which is, what if generative AI just is not profitable? And I think this is a question that we have to seriously consider at this point because its ramifications are significant. If I'm honest, I think the future of large language models will be largely client-side,

• 14:30Ed Zitron?

  on egregiously expensive personal setups for enthusiasts and in a handful of niche enterprise roles. Large language models do not scale profitably, and their functionality is not significant enough to justify the costs of running them. By immediately applying old economics, the idea that you would pay a monthly fee to have relatively unlimited access, companies like OpenAI and Anthropic immediately trained users to use their products in a way that was antithetical to their costs. Then again, had these models been served in that way, had they been mindful of the costs and charged what they actually were, there would likely have been no way to get this far. If OpenAI is making billions of dollars a month, or a billion dollars a month, or whatever the fuck it is, it's possibly losing that much or more after revenue. And that's the money it can get selling the product in a form that can never turn profitable itself.

• 15:15Ed Zitron?

  If OpenAI charged in line with its actual costs, would it even be able to justify a free version of ChatGPT outside of a few requests a month? The revenue you see today is what people are willing to pay for a product that loses money, and I cannot imagine they would pay as much if companies in question charged their costs. If I'm wrong, Curse will be just fine, and that's assuming that Curse's current hobbled form is even profitable, which it is not said it is. So you've got an entire industry of companies that struggle to do anything other than lose a lot of money. Great. And now we have a massive expansion of data centers, the likes of which we've never seen, all to capture demand for a product that nobody makes much money selling. This naturally leads to an important question: how do these people building data centers actually make money?

• 16:05Ed Zitron?

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• 16:49Ed Zitron?

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• 17:08Speaker 01

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• 17:39Speaker 05

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• 18:54Ed Zitron?

  At the start of August, The Wall Street Journal published one of the most worrying facts I've seen in the last two years. The Journal quoted investor Paul Kudrowski as saying that, and I quote, "As a percentage of gross domestic product, spending on AI infrastructure has already exceeded spending on telecom and internet infrastructure from the dot-com boom, and it's still growing." Kudrowski described this insane capex spending as a sort of "private sector stimulus program." The Journal also quotes analyst Neil Dutta as saying that capex spending for AI contributed more to growth in the US economy in the past two quarters than all consumer spending. "The massive build-out of data centers and the associated physical gear like chips, servers, and raw materials for building them has become a massive dominant economic force, building capacity for an industry that is yet to prove it can make real money."

• 19:39Ed Zitron?

  And no, Microsoft talking about its zero revenue in its last quarterly earnings for the first time is not the same thing as it stopped explicitly stating its AI revenue in January, when it was $13 billion annualized, so about a billion a month. And by the way, that's revenue, not profit. Just to remind you, I need to every time, remind anyone whoever mentions AI revenue, that that's not profit. Anyway, AI capex allegedly, though I've heard some questions about this figure, accounts for 1.2% of the US GDP in the first half of the year, and it accounted for more than half of the, to quote the Wall Street Journal, "already sluggish 1.2% growth of the US economy in the first half of the year." Another Wall Street Journal piece published a few days later discussed how data center

• 20:22Ed Zitron?

  development is souring the free cash flow for big tech, turning them from the kind of asset-light businesses that the markets love into entities burdened by physical real estate and their associated costs. And I quote, "For years, investors loved those companies because they were asset-light. They earned their profits on intangible assets such as intellectual property, software and digital platforms with network effects. This can be seen as a metric called free cash flow, roughly defined as cash flow from operations minus capital expenditures. This is arguably the purest measure of businesses' underlying cash generating potential. From 2016 through 2023, free cash flow and net earnings of Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft grew roughly in tandem. But since 2023, the two

• 21:03Ed Zitron?

  have diverged. The four companies' combined net income is up 73% to 91 billion in the second quarter from two years earlier, while free cash flow is down 30% to 40 billion, according to Fact Sheet data. Apple, a relative piker on capital spending, has also seen free cash flow lag behind." These numbers are all very scary, and I mean that sincerely, but they also fail to explain why. How much was actually spent on AI capex in the US? One would think two different articles on the subject would include that number versus a single quarter's worth, but from my estimates, I expect capital expenditures from the magnificent seven alone to crest $200 billion in the first half of 2025, with Axios estimating they'd spend around $400 billion total this year.

• 21:45Ed Zitron?

  Most articles are drafting off of a blog from Paul Kudrowski, who estimates that total AI capex would be somewhere in the region of $520 billion for the total of the year, which felt conservative for me, so I did the smart thing and asked him.

• 21:58Ed Zitron?

  Kudrowski noted that these numbers focused entirely on the four big spenders, Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon, and his own estimated $312 billion capex and that 1.2% number came from the assumption that the US GDP in 2025 will be around $28 trillion, which is lower than other forecasts, which put it around 30 trillion even. Kudrowski, in his own words, was trying to be conservative, using public data and then building his analysis from there. I personally believe his estimate is too conservative because it doesn't factor in the capital expenditures from Oracle, which along with Crusoe is building the vast Abilene, Texas data center for OpenAI, or any other private data center developers sinking cash into AI capex. When I asked him to elaborate, he estimated that AI spending all in was around half of

• 22:40Ed Zitron?

  3% Q2 real GDP growth. He added that it could be half of US GDP full year GDP growth if certain conditions amount. That's so cool. Half of the US economy's growth came from building data centers for generative AI, which is the combined revenue of a little more than the fucking smartwatch industry did in 2024. Another troubling point is that big tech doesn't just buy data centers and uses them, but in many cases pays for a construction company to build them, fills them full of GPUs, then leases them from a company that runs them, meaning that they themselves don't have to personally staff up and maintain them. This creates an economic boom for construction companies in the short term, as well as lucrative contracts for ongoing support, as long as the company in question still wants them.

• 23:23Ed Zitron?

  While Microsoft or Amazon might use a data center and indeed act as if they own it, ultimately somebody else is holding the bag in the ultimate responsibility for said data center. One such company is QTS, a data center developer that leases to both Amazon and Meta, according to the New York Times, which was acquired by Blackstone in 2021 for $10 billion. Since then, Blackstone has used commercially mortgage-backed securities. I know, it's so great. To raise over $8.7 billion since then to sink into QTS's expansion, and as of mid-July said it be investing $25 billion in AI data centers and energy. Blackstone, according to the New York Times, sees strong demand from tech companies who apparently are willing to sign what they describe as airtight leases for fifteen to twenty years to rent out data center space.

• 24:08Ed Zitron?

  As a reminder, Microsoft has over a thousand lawyers in the company. Anyway, yet the Times also names another problem, the unanswered question of how these private equity firms actually exit these situations. Blackstone, KKR and other asset management firms do not buy companies with the intention of siphoning off revenue, but to pump them and sell them to another company, or dump them onto the public markets, of course. Much like AI startups, it isn't obvious who would buy QTS at what I imagine would be a twenty-five or thirty billion dollar valuation, meaning that Blackstone would, as I've mentioned, have to take them public. Similarly, KKR's supposed fifteen billion dollar partnership with investment firm Energy Capital Partners to build data centers and their associated utilities does not appear to have much of an exit plan either.

• 24:49Ed Zitron?

  And let's not forget Oracle OpenAI and Crusoe's abominable mess in Abilene, Texas, where Oracle is paying for forty billion dollars' worth of GPUs. And Crusoe is spending fifteen billion dollars raised from Blue Owl Capital and primary digital infrastructure, though I think JP Morgan is involved too, to build data centers for OpenAI, a company that loses billion dollars of... Yeah, why would they do that, right? Why? Why would they do that? Well, it's simple, you rube, you moron, you buffoon! It's so that OpenAI can allegedly, starting in 2028, pay Oracle thirty billion dollars a year for compute. And I'm being fully serious. To be clear, OpenAI, by my estimates, has made only five point two six billion dollars this year, and will have trouble meeting their twelve point seven billion dollar revenue

• 25:33Ed Zitron?

  projection for 2025, and will likely lose more than ten billion dollars doing so. Oracle will, according to the information, owe Crusoe one billion dollars in payments across a fifteen-year span of a lease. How does Crusoe afford to pay back its fifteen billion dollars in loans? Beats me! The information says that Crusoe is raising a billion dollars to take on the cloud giants by earning construction, management fees and rent, and it can sell its stake in the project upon reaching certain completion milestones, while also building its own AI compute, making the assumption that the demand is there outside of hyperscalers. Then there's Core Wave, my least favorite company in the world. As I discussed a few months ago, Core Wave is burdened by obscene debt and a horrifying cash burn, and has seen its stock spike to a high of one hundred and eighty-three on

• 26:15Ed Zitron?

  June twentieth, twenty twenty-five, which has led to an all-stock attempt to acquire developer Core Scientific for nine billion dollars. And they doing that with all stock and now that's falling apart because CoreWeave as my last check and who knows where it will be by the time this episode runs is below a hundred bucks because the IPO lockout has gone. All the people that invested seem to be getting out. We'll see where they go from here. CoreWeave by the way has since gone public and had to borrow billions of dollars to fund their obscene capital expenditures. And they are also by the way going to have to handle in October the beginning of their DDTL 2.0, their biggest loan. And that's also when OpenAI is allegedly going to start paying them for their compute. And by the way, they lose hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 27:00Ed Zitron?

  They lose so much money every quarter. They have no path to profitability. Every time I think about CoreWeave, I feel crazy. And to be honest, going to be honest when I put out that blog and people sent me some very unfair emails about that. They said there's no way that CoreWeave can run out of money. If CoreWeave runs out of money, by the way, and they collapse, which I think is very possible, I'm taking some fucking names on this one. A lot of people, very unfair to Mr. Zitron. CoreWeave I add is also pretty much reliant on Microsoft as one of its primary customers. While this relationship has been fairly smooth, so far, as far as we know, this dependence also presents an existential threat to CoreWeave and is part of the reason why I'm so pessimistic about their survival. Microsoft has its own infrastructure and has every incentive to cut out middlemen when

• 27:45Ed Zitron?

  it's able to meet supply with the demand itself owns, or leases rather than subcontracts out, simply because middlemen add costs and shrink margins. If Microsoft walks what's left, how does it service its ongoing obligations and the debt? In all of these cases, data center developers seem to have very few options as to making actual money. We have companies spending billions of dollars to vastly expand their data center footprint, but very little evidence that doing so results in revenue, let alone some sort of payoff event. And similarly, the actual capital expenditures they're making are much smaller than those of big tech. Digital Realty Trust, one of the largest developers with over 300 data centers worldwide and $5.5 billion in revenue in 2024, only spent $3.5 billion in CapEx last quarter.

• 28:29Ed Zitron?

  And Equinix, $8.7 billion of revenue in 2024 total, which has 270 data centers, but CapEx at $3.5 billion for the quarter two. NTT Global Data Centers, which has over 160 of the fuckers, has dedicated $10 billion in CapEx through 2027 to build out more of them. Yet in many of these cases, it's because these companies are, to quote a source of mine, "functionally obsolete for this cycle because legacy data centers are not plug-and-play ready for GPUs to slot into." And remember, GPUs and the way they work with generative AI is just atypical. They burn them, they run them hot constantly, they're running full fucking tail the whole fucking time. It's absolutely ridiculous, leading to a bunch of replacements, but it, just to be specific, requires a bunch of specialized cooling and much more energy.

• 29:14Ed Zitron?

  And yeah, there's just, it's not a thing where you just take out one computer and you put in another. And also, any investment in CapEx by these companies would have to be for both GPUs and said retrofitting, by the way. Massive amounts of money. And this means that the money flowing into AI data centers is predominantly going to NeoClouds like CoreWeave and Crusoe, and all seems to flow back to private equity firms that never thought about where the cash out might be. Blackstone led Corby's $7.5 billion loan with Magdala Capital, who by the way was involved with a bunch of subprime mortgages, and Crusoe signed a deal a week ago with infrastructure firm and they're also owned by Blackstone called Tallgrass, and they're building a data center in Wyoming. All of which seems very good for Blackstone unless you think, how does it actually make money here?

• 29:57Ed Zitron?

  As private equity firms generally not like to hold assets longer than five years, and the timer is running. Even if it did, its capital expenditures are a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things. Assuming Crusoe burns, as the information suggests it will, as much as $4 billion in 2025, CoreWeave spends as much as $20 billion, Digital Realty Trust spends as much as $14 billion, Global Data Centers $3.33 billion, that's $10 billion over three years, Equinix spends $14 billion. That's about $55.33 billion in AI CapEx spent in 2025 from the largest developers of data centers in the world. For some context, $102 billion was spent by Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon in the last quarter. Private equity may face the same problem as AI startups in the end, though.

• 30:42Ed Zitron?

  There is no real exit strategy for any of these investments. Furthermore, the supposed AI capex boom that's driving the US economy is not, as reported, driven by the massive interest in driving AI infrastructure up for a variety of customers. The reality is simple: the majority of AI capex is from big tech, which is a massive systemic weakness for our economy.

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• 33:00Ed Zitron?

  Now while some might say that AI capex has swallowed the US economy, I think it's more appropriate to say that big tech capex has swallowed the US economy. I also want to be clear that the economy, which is the overall state of a country's production and consumption of stuff and the flow of money between participants in said economy and the markets, as in the stock market, well, those are two very different things, but the calculations from Paul Kudrowski and others have now allowed us to see where one might hit the other. You see, the markets do not actually represent reality. While Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta might want you to think there's a ton of money in AI, their growth is mostly from selling further iterations and contracts of their existing stuff, or in the case of Meta, further increasing its ad revenue. The economy is where things are actually bought and sold, representing the economic

• 33:43Ed Zitron?

  effects of both the things that happen to build out the AI boom, or whatever you call it, and selling access to the services and the models themselves. I recognize this is simplistic, but I'm laying it out for a reason. As I discussed in the three-part Haters' Guide to the AI Bubble, Nvidia is the weak point in the US stock market, representing 90% of the value of the magnificent seven, which in turn makes up about 35% of the value of the US stock market. The associated magnificent seven stocks have seen a huge boom through their own growth, which has been mistakenly and incorrectly attributed to revenue from AI, which I've laid out previously, is about $40 billion of revenue, what, in the last year or two? Maybe a little bit more? Nevertheless, the markets can continue to be irrational because all they care about

• 34:24Ed Zitron?

  is number going up, as the value of a stock is oftentimes disconnected from the value of the company itself, instead associated with its kind of propensity for growth. It's fishy, it sucks, and it's gonna end badly. GDP and other measurements of the economy aren't really something you can fudge quite as easily, nor can you say a bunch of fancy words to make people feel better in the event that growth stalls or declines. This leads me to my principal worry, that AI capex is actually a term for the expenditures of four companies, namely Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta, with Nvidia's GPU sales being part of that capex too. While we include, you can if you want, include others like Oracle, XAI and various Neo Clouds like Call Weevan Crusoe, who according to D A Davidson's Gil Luria will account

• 35:08Ed Zitron?

  for about 10% of GPU sales from Nvidia in 2025. The reality is that whatever economic force is being driven by AI investment is really just for companies building and leasing data centers to burn on generative AI, a product that makes a relatively small amount of money before losing a great deal more. Also, want to be clear, Anthropic runs on Amazon and Google, OpenAI runs on Microsoft. These companies don't really own their own infrastructure. That's what OpenAI is allegedly building with Oracle. Now, 42% of Nvidia's revenue comes from Magnificent 7, per Laura Brand at Yahoo Finance. Big up to Laura, one of the best out there, which naturally means that big tech is the linchpin of investment in data centers. I'll put it far more simply. If AI capex represents such a large part of our GDP and economic growth, our economy

• 35:52Ed Zitron?

  does on some level rest on the back of Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon and their continued investment in AI. What should worry everybody is that Microsoft, which makes up 18.9% of Nvidia's revenue, has signed basically no leases in the last 12 months and its committed data center construction and land purchases are down year over year. Also, their data center capex is not all going to be AI and all of these data centers won't necessarily be used for that. In fact, nothing they're doing suggests that they're super into it. It's not, it's not good. And while its capex may not have dipped yet, in part because the chip-heavy nature of generative AI means that capex isn't exclusively dominated by property or construction, it's now obvious

• 36:33Ed Zitron?

  that if it does, there will be direct effects on both the US economy and the stock market as Microsoft is part of what amounts to a stimulus package propping up America's economic growth. And not to repeat the point too much, but big tech has yet to actually turn anything resembling a profit on these data centers and isn't making much revenue at all out of generative AI. How exactly does this end? What is the plan here? Is big tech going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year in capex on generative AI in perpetuity? Will they continue to buy more and more Nvidia chips as they do so? Because it's always got to be more. It can't be the same. They must get more, otherwise- Nvidia doesn't grow. At some point, surely these companies have built enough data centers. Surely, at some point, they will run out of space to put these GPUs in.

• 37:17Ed Zitron?

  Is the plan to, by then, make so much money from AI that it won't matter? What does Nvidia do at that point? How does the US economy rebound from the loss of activity that follows? I don't fucking know, and it's worrying me. As I've said again and again, the generative AI bubble is and always has been fundamentally irrational and inherently Gothic, playing in the ruins, patterns, and pathways of previous tech booms despite this one having little or no resemblance to them. Though the tech industry loves to talk about building a glorious future, its presence is one steeped in rituals of death and decay, where the virtues of value creation and productivity take a backseat to burning billions of dollars and lying to the public again and again and again. The way in which the media has participated in these lies is disgusting.

• 38:00Ed Zitron?

  Venture capital, still drunk off the fumes of 2021, keeps running the same old playbook. Shove as much money into a company as possible in the hopes you can dump it onto an acquirer of the public markets, only to get high on their own supply, pushing valuations to the point that there's no possible liquidity event for the majority of big private AI companies as a result of their overstuffed valuations, burdensome business models, and a lack of any real intellectual property. And, like the rest of the AI bubble, Silicon Valley's only liquidity path out of the bubble is big tech itself. Without Google, Character.ai and WinSav's founders would likely have been left for dead, and the same goes for Inflection. And I'd even argue Scale AI, whose $14.3 billion investment, doing air quotes there for Meta,

• 38:42Ed Zitron?

  effectively decapitated the company, removing its CEO Alexander Wang, leaving the rest of the company to die, laying off 14% of its staff and 500 contractors mere weeks after its CEO and investors cashed in. In fact, generative AI is turning out to be a fever dream, entirely made up big, big tech. OpenAI would be dead if it wasn't for the massive infrastructure provided by Microsoft at cost in returns for its rights to its IP, research, and the ability to sell its models on top of tens of billions of dollars of venture capital thrown into its billion-dollar cash incinerator. Anthropic would be dead if both Google and Amazon, the latter of which provides most of its infrastructure, hadn't invested billions in keeping it alive so that it can burn $3 billion or more in 2025 while fucking over its enterprise customers and rate-limiting the rest.

• 39:27Ed Zitron?

  The generative AI industry is at its core unnatural. It does not make significant revenue compared to its unbelievable costs, nor does it have much revenue potential itself. It requires, unlike just about every other software revolution, an unbelievable amount of physical infrastructure to run. And because nobody but big tech can afford to build the infrastructure necessary, creates very little opportunity for competition or efficiency. As the markets are in the throes of the growth at all costs rot economy, they failed to keep big tech in line, conflating big tech's ability to grow with growth driven as a result of the capital expenditures. Sensible, reasonable markets would notice the decay of free cash flow or the ridiculousness of big tech's capex bonanza, but instead they clap and squeal and oink whenever Sachin Adella jingles his keys.

• 40:10Ed Zitron?

  And I got told the other day by someone that Sachin Adella is not a business idiot, that he's secretly this big tech guy. And here's, here's what I'd like to say to them. It's fucking stupid. It's fucking dumb. If this guy's actually technical, he's just a craven liar. I actually think he's a bozo. Anyway, but in that side, what's missing is any real value generation. Again, I tell you, put aside any feelings you may have about generative AI itself and focus on the actual economic results of this bubble. How much revenue is there? Why is there no profit? Why are there no exits? Why does big tech, which has sunk hundreds of billions of dollars into generative AI, not talk about the money they're making from it? Why, for three straight years, have we been asked just wait and see? And for how long are we going to have to wait?

• 40:54Ed Zitron?

  And when are we going to see it? What's incredible is that the inherently compute-intensive nature of generative AI basically requires the construction of these facilities, without actually representing whether they are contributing to the revenues of the companies that operate the models, like Anthropic or OpenAI or any other business that builds on top of them. As the models get more complex and hungry, more data centers get built, which hyperscalers book as long-term revenue, even though it's subsidized by hyperscalers or funded by VC money. This in turn stimulates even more capex spending. And without having to answer any basic questions about longevity or market fit. Longevity, longevity, I don't know. Yet the worst part of this financial farce is that we've now got a built-in economic breaking point in the form of capex from AI.

• 41:38Ed Zitron?

  At some point, capex has to slow, if not because the lack of revenues or massive costs associated, but because we live in a world with finite space. And when said capex slow happens, so will the purchase of Nvidia GPUs, which in turn, as proven by Kudrowski and others, slow America's economic growth. And that growth is pretty much based on the whims of four companies, which is an incredibly risky and scary proposition. I haven't even dug into the wealth of private credit deals that underpin build outs from private AI neo-clouds like Core, Wave, Crusoe, Nebius and Lambda, in part because their economic significance is so much smaller than the big tech's ugly mainland sprawl, and because I don't like saying their names very much. To quote Paul Kudrowski, "We live in a historically anomalous moment. Regardless

• 42:21Ed Zitron?

  of what one thinks about the merits of AI or explosive data center expansion, the scale and pace of capital deployment into a rapidly depreciating technology is remarkable. These are not railroad. We aren't building century-long infrastructure. AI data centers are short-lived, asset-intensive facilities, writing declining cost technology curves, requiring frequent hardware replacement to preserve margins." To which I say, "What margins, Paul?" But nevertheless, you can't bail this out because there is nothing to bail out. Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Google have plenty of money and have proven they can spend it. Nvidia is already doing everything it can to justify people spending more on their GPUs. There's little more it can do here other than soak up the growth before

• 43:02Ed Zitron?

  the party ends. That capex reduction will bring with it a reduction in expenditures on those GPUs, which will take a chunk out of the US stock market. Although the stock market isn't the economy, the two things are inherently linked, and the popping of the AI bubble will have downstream ramifications, just like the dot-com bubble did with the wider economy. Expect to see an acceleration in layoffs and offshoring, in part driven by a need for tech companies to show, for the first time in living memory, fiscal restraint. For cities where tech is a major sector of the economy, think Seattle and San Francisco, there'll be knock-on effects to those companies and individuals that support the tech sector, like restaurants, construction companies building apartments, Uber drivers and so on. We'll see a drying up of VC funding, which is kind of already starting. Pension

• 43:47Ed Zitron?

  funds will take a hit, which will affect how much people have to spend in retirement. It'll be grim. Worse than that is the fact that these companies will be, by definition, non-performing assets and ones that inflicted an opportunity cost that will be impossible to calculate. While a house, once built and sold, technically falls into that category, doesn't add to any economic productivity, obviously, people at least need somewhere to live. Shelter is an essential component of life. You can live without a data center the size of Manhattan. What would happen if companies like Microsoft and Meta instead spent the money on things that actually drove productivity or created a valuable competitive business that drove economic activity, for example? Hell, even if they just gave everyone a 10% raise, it would likely be better for the economy than this if we're factoring in things like consumer spending.

• 44:30Ed Zitron?

  Instead, it's just waste, ugly, pointless waste. In summary, we're already facing the prospect of a recession, and though I'm not an economist, I can imagine it being a particularly nasty one, given that the Magnificent Seven accounted for 47.87% of the Russell 1000 Index's returns in 2024. Even if big tech somehow makes this crap profitable, they won't, it's hard to imagine that they'll be able to counterbalance any CapEx reduction with revenue, because there doesn't seem to be that much revenue in generative AI to begin with. This is what happens when you allow the rot economy to run wild, building the stock market and tech industry on growth over everything else. This is what happens when the tech media repeatedly fails to hold the powerful to account, catering to their narratives and making excuses for their abominable billion-dollar

• 45:14Ed Zitron?

  losses and mediocre, questionably useful products. What for all you want about the so-called agentic era or annualized revenues that make you hot under the collar, I see no reason for celebration about an industry with no exit plans and needless capital expenditures that appear to be one of the few things keeping the American economy growing for effectively no reason. I've been writing about the tech industry's obsession with generative AI for two years, and I've really never felt more grim. Before this was an economic uncertainty, a way that our markets might contract, that big tech might take a big haircut, that a bunch of money might have been wasted, but otherwise the world could keep turning, right? It felt before Kudrowski said that thing and it came, this was all sitting in

• 45:57Ed Zitron?

  public as well. I don't know how I missed it. It felt until then that it was like, oh, this will really fuck up big tech. It will hit their stocks. It'll be bad for them. Now, because the economy has slowed so much, otherwise this data center capex in these four companies is holding everything up and it won't last forever. There's, there's just no way it can last forever. And there's not really anything to bulk it up or, and Microsoft's already pulling back. How does this end? I keep asking that. The original title of this was called, how does this end? And I really don't know how this ends. It feels as if everything is aligning for disaster. And I, I really fear there's nothing that can be done to avert it. I will be here to tell you what's happening as it happens. And your

• 46:39Ed Zitron?

  third part for this week is going to be about GPT five, which I'm going to be honest, doesn't really fill me full of hope or promise either.

• 46:55Ed 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 app to visit the discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 47:28Speaker 03

  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.

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