The Case Against Generative AI (Part 4)

This is an iHeart podcast.

There's more to San Francisco with the Chronicle.

There's more food for thought, more thought for food.

There's more data insights to help with those day-to-day choices.

There's more to the weather than whether it's going to rain.

And with our arts and entertainment coverage, you won't just get out more, you'll get more out of it.

At the Chronicle, knowing more about San Francisco is our passion.

Discover more at sfchronicle.com.

So, I love Square.

They make paying for stuff at a store really easy.

I just use them at Court Street Grocers to buy a sandwich here in Brooklyn, New York.

Their stuff's reliable, easy to use, and it just works for both businesses and their customers.

Square keeps up so you don't have to slow down.

Get everything you need to run and grow your business without any long-term commitments.

And why wait?

Right now, you can get up to $200 off Square hardware at square.com/slash go/slash better offline.

That's

u a r e dot com slash go slash better offline run your business smarter with square get started today a GLP one helped you lose weight but why accept the unwanted facial changes that came with it hollowing sagging skin wrinkles when you can do something about it learn more at faceafterweightloss dot com that's faceafterweightloss dot com

Adobe Acrobat Studio so brand new show me all the things PDFs can do do your work with ease and speed PDF spaces is all you need.

Do hours of research in an instant.

With key insights from an AI assistant.

Pick a template with a click.

Now your Prezo looks super slick.

Close that deal, yeah, you won.

Do that, doing that, did that, done.

Now you can do that, do that with Acrobat.

Now you can do that, do that with the all-new Acrobat.

It's time to do your best work with the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio.

CoolZone media.

All right, we're back.

I'm Ed Zitron, and this is Better Offline.

This is the fourth and final episode of this four-part series where I dissect in excruciating, comprehensive detail the AI bubble and tell you why I think its implosion is inevitable.

We're at the end, which is fitting, because in this episode, we're going to talk about why and how this entire sham dies.

Again, if you're jumping in now, start from the beginning.

We talk about a lot of things and it all kind of threads together.

I know, I know, you want to hear my explanation of how open AI is fucked with the capital fuck, but we've got to lay the groundwork to get there.

Okay, caught up?

Good?

Good.

We're good.

We're good.

You ready?

Ready?

We're good?

You're good?

Yep.

Yep.

Okay, we'll begin.

One of the comfortable lies that people tell themselves is that the AI bubble is similar to the fiber boom or the dot-com boom or Uber or that we're in the growth stage or that this is what software companies do.

They spend a bunch of money, then pull the profit lever.

The thing is, this is nothing like anything you've ever seen before because this is the dumbest shit the tech industry has ever ever done.

AI data centers are nothing like fiber because there are very few actual use cases for these GPUs outside of AI and none of them are remotely hyperscale revenue drivers.

As I discussed a month or so ago, data center development accounted for more of America's GDP growth than all consumer spending combined in the first half of 2025.

And there really isn't any demand for AI in general, let alone at the scale that these hundreds of billions of dollars are being sunk into.

The conservative conservative estimate of capital expenditures related to data centers is around 400 billion dollars, but given the 50 billion dollar in a quarter in private equity invested, I'm gonna guess it breaks half a trillion, or to build capacity for an industry yet to prove itself.

And this whole Nvidia OpenAI $100 billion funding news should only fill you full of dread.

But also isn't fucking finalized.

Stop reporting as if it's done.

I swear to fucking

Anyway.

Good.

According to CNBC, and I quote, the initial $10 billion tranche is locked in at a $500 billion valuation and expected to close within a month or so once the transaction has been finalized, with successive $10 billion rounds planned, each to be priced at the company's then-current valuation as new capacity comes online.

What a horrible deal.

They can just raise whatever.

You can just go back to NVIDIA.

But...

Let me just be clear.

OpenAI has written a lot of checks that neither it nor anyone else can cash.

And for it to survive, it needs to raise more than, honestly, about $500 billion and maybe another $400 billion in other people paying for stuff.

It's astonishing, really.

At no point is anyone asking how exactly OpenAI builds the data centers to fill full of the GPUs to get the rest of NVIDIA's funding.

In fact, I'm genuinely shocked and a little disgusted by how poorly this story has been told.

Let's go point by point.

$10 billion is not enough for OpenAI to build a data center.

The 1.1, 1.2 gigawatt Abilene, Texas data center being built by Oracle and Cruiser for OpenAI required $15 billion in debt, and that's not including the $40 billion of chips needed to power it.

though i question whether all of those are going into abilene or somewhere else which we'll get to later

open ai can also not afford to pay for everything it's promised open ai will burn they say 115 billion dollars in the next four years according to the information but i believe the company intentionally leaked those numbers before the announcement of their 300 billion dollar deal with oracle So when you take into account the numbers shared by the information, which involved them burning $47 billion in 2028, a year when OpenAI is meant to make $70 billion in payments to compute to Oracle, another $28 billion to Microsoft for any other cost.

There's no space for the $300 billion to go.

And there's actually another $100 billion they're promising for backup compute as well.

On top of all of this, OpenAI is still yet to convert to a for-profit entity and must do so by the end of 2025 or they'll lose $20 billion in funding from SoftBank.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft and OpenAI co-published an announcement that said they'd signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding for the next phase of their partnership, which the media quickly took to mean a deal was done.

No deal has been done.

This is an announcement of nothing.

On top of all of this, venture capital might run out of the current rate of investment in around six quarters, and OpenAI needs more investment than ever.

The information recently published some worrying data from venture capitalist John Sakoda that at today's clip, the industry would run out of money in six quarters, adding that the money wouldn't run out until the end of 2028 if it wasn't for OpenAI and Anthropic.

In a very real sense, OpenAI threatens the future of available capital for the tech tech industry.

Well, the good news is that they're going to make lots of money, right?

I mean, OpenAI leaked that they'll make $200 billion

in four years' time.

I mean, if you're concussed, I can see how you believe that.

Let's go.

I'm going to read you a bunch of numbers.

I know it's kind of going to be annoying to hear this.

For the next 30 seconds, I'm going to just throw figures at you, but pay attention because it's important to realize how insane this is.

So, in 2025, OpenAI projects to make $13 billion and have free cash flow of negative $9 billion.

In 2026, OpenAI will make $29 billion, or $30 billion, but have free cash flow of negative $17 billion.

In 2027, OpenAI will make $60 billion, but have negative cash flow of negative $35 billion.

And in 2028, OpenAI will make $100 billion, but have free cash flow of negative $47 billion.

In 2029, OpenAI will make $145 billion, but have free cash flow of negative $8 billion somehow.

I just want to reiterate that.

OpenAI's projections see it reduce its negative cash flow by $39 billion or one and a half times 3M's revenue from the last financial year in a single year while also increasing their revenue by a similar amount.

Give or take a few billion.

Who's counting?

Certainly not Sarah Fryer, the CFO of OpenAI.

It's also fucking stupid, but don't worry.

I know.

I know some of you have been worried.

You see big, strong men with tears in their eyes

saying, sir, sir, OpenAI,

they're going to have enough money.

They're going to die.

But don't worry.

In 2030, OpenAI will make $200 billion and somehow have positive free cash flow of $38 billion.

It's just that easy.

I don't teach you this in business school.

It's just that easy.

How are they going to make it?

They're going to make it.

They'll be fine.

OpenAI's current reported burn is $115 billion through 2030, which means there's no way that these projections that were leaked included $300 billion in compute costs, even when you factor in the revenue.

There's no space in the projections to absorb the Oracle money.

And from what I can tell, by 2029, OpenAI will have burned upwards of $290 billion, assuming it survives that long, which I do not believe it will.

Don't worry, though, OpenAI is about to make some crazy money.

I say, in no way being totally sarcastic.

I'm going to now read you some of the projections that CFO Sarah Fryer signed off on.

This is a professional chief financial officer.

Again, more numbers, but pay attention.

Pay attention.

This is, I want to give you, because these are numbers you just heard, but I want to give you some comparison points.

So in 2026, OpenAI will make, according to their projections, or these are the projections, $30 billion in revenue, or just under the $34 billion that Salesforce made in 2024.

In 2027, OpenAI will allegedly make $60 billion, or $2.6 billion more than the $57.4 billion that Oracle made in its fiscal year 2025, or $8.4 billion more than Broadcom made in 2024.

In 2028, this is crazy, OpenAI will make $100 billion, $2.3 billion more than Tesla made in 2024, or

$11.66 billion more than TSMC, the single largest chip manufacturer in the world, made in 2024.

In 2029, things get crazier because OpenAI will then make $154 billion or $14.5 billion more than the $130.5 billion that NVIDIA made in its fiscal year 2025.

But in 2030, this is when they really blow the doors off.

They will make $200 billion or $35.5 billion than the $164.5 billion that Meta made in 2024.

Just so we are clear, OpenAI intends to 10x its revenue in the space of four years selling software and access to its models in an industry with about $60 billion of revenue in 2025.

How will it do this?

OpenAI does not say.

I don't know, OpenAI CFO Sarah Fryer, but I do know that signing off on these numbers is at the very least ethically questionable.

But putting aside the ridiculousness of OpenAI's deals or its funding requirements, Fryer has willfully allowed Sam Altman and OpenAI to state goals that defy reality or good sense, all to take advantage of investors and public markets that have completely lost the plot.

I'm actually.

You know what?

I'm actually going to be blunter.

OpenAI has signed multiple different deals and contracts for amounts it cannot afford to pay, that it cannot hope to raise the money to pay for, that defy the amounts of venture capital and private capital available, all to sustain a company that will burn half a trillion dollars in the next four years based on their own expenditures and they have no path to profitability of any kind.

But what about that NVIDIA deal, Ed?

$100 billion is a lot of money, right?

It is, but the announcement is bullshit.

I know you may have read otherwise, but NVIDIA didn't give OpenAI $100 billion.

In fact, $90 billion of that is contingent on OpenAI building roughly $125 billion worth of data centers with $200 billion worth of GPUs inside them.

And those data centers will have to be built faster than anyone could possibly build something of that scale.

And there's no evidence that OpenAI knows where or when these facilities will be built or who will build them.

Important detail as well: NVIDIA's data centers have nothing to do with Stargate.

So, when you read that OpenAI has seven gigawatts of Stargate, whatever, it doesn't exist, who cares?

That's nothing to do with NVIDIA.

Oracle is not building these data centers.

The 10 gigawatts that they need to build with NVIDIA are something completely separate.

Ever wanted to stay on vacation longer?

Us too.

With Verbo's long stay discounts, you can stay longer and save more on select properties.

Gotta love a win-win.

Book the perfect summer getaway today with Verbo private vacation rentals.

Your future self will thank you later.

So I'm a big fan of Quince.

I've been shopping with them long before they advertised with the show, and I just picked up a bunch of their Pima cotton t-shirts after they came back in stock, as well as another overshirt, because I love to wear them like a jacket over a t-shirt.

Talking of jackets, I'm planning to pick up one of their new leather racer jackets very, very soon.

Their clothes fit well, they fall nicely on the body, and feel high quality, like you get at a big, nice department store, except they're a lot cheaper because Quince is direct-to-consumer.

And that's part of what makes Quince different.

They partner directly with ethical factories and skip the middlemen, so you get top fabrics and craftsmanship at half the price of similar brands, and they ship quickly too.

I highly recommend them, and we'll be giving them money in the future.

Layer up this fall with pieces that feel as good as they look.

Go to quince.com/slash better for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns.

Now available in Canada too.

That's q uince.com slash better.

Free shipping and 365 day returns.

Quince.com slash better.

Still using a copy-paste website?

Break the template trap with framer.

Whether you're overwhelmed by traditional site builders or frustrated with cookie-cutter designs, Framer gives you the freedom to create a site that's professional, polished, and uniquely yours.

Hit publish and framer ships your site worldwide in seconds.

No No code, no compromises.

While DIY website tools are everywhere, most fall short on design and performance.

Framer changes that with a powerful user-friendly platform that delivers developer-level results without writing a single line of code.

Framer is the design-first no-code website builder that lets anyone ship a production-ready site in minutes.

It's free to start.

Browse hundreds of pixel-perfect templates or design from a totally blank canvas, with multiplayer collaboration allowing your writer, designer, and marketer all to tweak the same page at once.

No version control nightmares.

Ready to build a a site that looks hand-coded without hiring a developer?

Launch your site for free at framer.com and use code offline to get your first month of pro on the house.

That's framer.com, promo code offline.

Framer.com, promo code offline.

Rules and restrictions may apply.

Homeowners, if you want to sell your house fast for all cash, stop what you are doing and listen to this because Osborne Homes wants to buy your house right now.

I'm Alec from Osborne Homes and we want to buy your house.

Nobody buys more homes in California than Osbourne.

Whether it's a a total fixer-upper or in perfect condition, Osborne Homes is the easiest way to sell your house fast, all cash.

Best of all, when you sell your house to Osborne Homes, there are zero commissions, zero fees, plus no banks, no realtors, no repairs, and no waiting to close.

We buy your house as is all cash.

Just go to osbornhomes.com right now to get your free, no obligation, all cash offer.

We are here and ready to buy your house 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Just go to osbornhomes.com.

Go to osbornhomes.com right now.

Don't wait.

Sell your house to Osborne Homes and put the cash in your pocket right away.

Just go to osbornhomes.com.

That's osbornholmes.com.

Osbornholmes.com.

Osbornholmes.com.

But you know what?

Let's take a step back with something really simple.

Data centers take forever to build.

As I've said previously, based on current reports, it's taking Oracle and Cruiser around 2.5 years per per gigawatt of data set capacity.

And nowhere in these reports does one reporter take a fucking second to say, hey, what data centers are you talking about?

Hey, didn't Sam Altman say back in July he was building 10 gigawatts of data center capacity with Oracle?

But wait, now Oracle and OpenAI have done another announcement that says they're only doing 7 gigawatts, but they're already ahead of schedule on 10 gigawatts.

Like I said, totally different 10 gigawatts to the one with NVIDIA.

But you know what?

You've got a few hundred billion dollars of data centers.

Now you're making real money.

Anyway, I cannot be clear enough how unlikely it is that the first gigawatt of NVIDIA systems will be deployed in the second half of 2026, as NVIDIA has stated with their deal with OpenAI.

And that's as if the land has been bought and got permits and the construction has started.

None of this has happened.

But,

you know, let's get really specific on costs.

Crusoe's 1.2 gigawatts of compute for OpenAI is a $15 billion joint venture, which means a gigawatt of compute runs about $12.5 billion worth of construction.

Abilene's eight buildings are meant to hold 50,000 NVIDIA GB200 GPUs and their associated networking infrastructure.

So let's say a gigawatt is around 333,000 Blackwell GPUs, even though the GB200s are technically two of them put together.

Though this math is a little funky due to NVIDIA promising to install its new Rubin GPUs in these theoretical data centers, that means these data centers will require a little under $200 billion worth of GPUs.

By my maths, that's about $325 billion, but NVIDIA is saying it could be half a trillion.

But you know, who gives a shit, right?

Numbers don't matter.

you've got jensen wong telling cnbc that one gigawatt costs 50 60 billion dollars you've got altman claiming the same thing to bloomberg but my math says something completely fucking different

but no one seems to want to bother you know it's only like the places i'm quoting are leading business outlets with teams of thousands of people with incredible infrastructure where they could sit down and say well you know It costs this much to build Stargate Abilene.

Why don't we work out actually what this costs?

No, no, no.

Just eat the info slop.

Yum, yum, yum.

You know, it doesn't exhaust me.

It doesn't make me cynical and frustrated with people who could do a good job.

Indeed, I've seen them do a good job, but they just seem to not want to do one with this.

And it genuinely bothers me on a day-to-day basis.

Okay, I realize I'm just ranting at this point, but I'm going to be honest.

I'm just, I'm so tired of this.

As a reminder, as well, OpenAI has agreed to spend $300 billion on compute with Oracle, but at this point, as you can tell, numbers basically don't have meaning.

Numbers have stopped meaning anything.

If you believe these numbers, you're a fantasist or a liar, or you just don't want to think about them too much, because when you think about them, you start to realize how unrealistic it is.

And even if you remain steadfast in your belief of the transformative potential of large language models, eventually there comes a point where reality must prevail and you accept that we're in a bubble, whether you like it or not.

What we're witnessing is one of the most egregious wastes of capital in history, sold by career charlatans with their reputations laundered by a tech and business media afraid to criticize the powerful and analysts that don't seem to want to tell their investors the truth.

There are no historic comparisons here.

Even Britain's abominable 1800s railway bubble, which absorbed half of the country's national income, created valuable infrastructure for trains, a vehicle that can move people to and from places.

The train doesn't randomly just go backwards when you make it go forwards.

It doesn't become a bus or a dog at random.

It doesn't hallucinate doors that open and close at random.

Trains work.

And GPUs are not trains, nor are they cars or even CPUs.

They are not adaptable to many other kinds of work, nor are they the infrastructure of the future of tech, because they're already quite old and with everybody focused on buying them, you'd absolutely see one other use case by now that actually mattered.

GPUs are expensive, power-hungry, environmentally destructive, and require their own kinds of cooling and server infrastructure, making every GPU data center an environmental and fiscal bubble unto themselves.

And whereas the Victorian train infrastructure still exists in the UK, though it has been upgraded over the years, a GPU has a limited useful lifespan.

These are cards that can and will break after a period of extended usage, whether that period is five years or later, though I hear it's one to three, and they'll inevitably be superseded by something better and more powerful, meaning that the resale value of that GPU will only go down with a price depreciation that's akin to a new car, and then a used car, and then a car that you kick the door of every so often.

I I am telling you, as I have been telling you for years, again and again and again, that the demand is not there for generative AI and the demand is never ever arriving.

The only reason anyone humors any of this crap is the endless hoarding of GPUs to build capacity for a revolution that will never arrive.

Well, that and OpenAI, a company that's built and sold on lies about ChatGPT's capabilities.

ChatGPT's popularity and OpenAI's hunger for endless amounts of compute have created the illusion of demand due to the sheer amount of capacity required to keep their services operational.

Also, they can burn around $8 billion or more in 2025 and hundreds of billions of dollars more by 2030, if they make it, which they won't.

The NVIDIA deal is a farce, an obvious attempt by the largest company on the American stock market to prop up the one significant revenue generator in the entire industry, knowing that time is running out for it to create new avenues for eternal growth.

I'd argue that NVIDIA's deal also shows the complete contempt that these companies have for the media.

There are no details about how this deal works beyond the initial $10 billion.

There's no land purchase, no data center construction started, yet the media slurps it down without a second thought.

I am but one man and I'm fucking peculiar.

I did not learn financial analysis in school, but I appear to be one of the few people doing even the most basic analysis of these deals.

And while I'm having a great time doing so, I'm also extremely frustrated about how little effort is being put into prying apart these deals by other people.

I realize how ridiculous all of this sounds.

I get it.

There's so much money being promised to so many people.

Market rallies built off the back of these massive deals.

And I get that the assumption is that this much money can't be wrong, that this many people wouldn't just say stuff without intending to follow through, or without considering whether their company could afford it.

I know it's hard to conceive that these hundreds of billions of dollars could be invested in something for no apparent reason, but it's happening right goddamn now in front of your eyes, and I am going to be merciless on anyone who attempts to write, how could we possibly have seen this coming?

Generative AI has never been reliable, has always been unprofitable, and has always been unsustainable, and I've been saying so since at least February 2024.

These economics have never made sense, something I've said repeatedly since April 2024, and when I wrote How Does Open AI Survive in July 2024, I had multiple people suggest I was being an alarmist.

Here's some alarmism for you.

The longer it takes for OpenAI to die, the more damage it will cause once it does.

As I talked about earlier in the series, venture capital could run out in six quarters, with investor and researcher John Sakota estimating that there will be only around $164 billion of dry powder, which is available capital, by the way, in US VC firms by the end 2025.

In July, the French tech journal reported, using Pitchbook data, the global venture capital deal activity reached its lowest first half total since 2018, with $139.4 billion in deal value in the first half of 2025, down from $183.4 billion in the first half of 2024, meaning that any further expansion or demands for venture capital from OpenAI will likely sap the dwindling funds available for other startups things get worse when you narrow things to u.s venture capital in a piece from april ernst and young reported the vc backed investment in u.s hit 80 billion dollars in q1 2025 but one 40 billion dollar deal accounted for half of the investment open ai's 40 billion dollar deal of which only 10 billion dollar has actually closed and that didn't happen until fucking june Without the imaginary money from OpenAI, US venture capital would have declined by 36%.

I should also add another $8.3 billion was added on the the top of that, but still, that's less than $40, folks.

The longer that OpenAI survives, the longer it will sap the remaining billions from the tech ecosystem, and I expect its tendrils to extend to private credit soon, too.

The $325 billion it needs just to fulfill its NVIDIA contract, albeit over four years, is an egregious sum that I believe exceeds the available private capital in the world.

And I went and actually looked.

Assuming that all of this capital is currently available, the top 10 private equity firms in the world have around $477 billion of available capital.

A reminder, $477 billion is a lot less than OpenAI's total commitments over the next few years.

In fact, I put a premium newsletter out just before recording this, so I didn't totally update the script, but OpenAI needs a trillion dollars.

They need about 500 billion for operations and about 450 billion for all the data centers they promised and the GPUs in them.

It's not really good.

It's not good at all.

But if we include the cash at hand at the biggest investment banks, this brings us up to, by the way, if we assume that all of these funds are available, about $562 billion in capital and $164 billion of venture capital in the US to spend.

And that's all meant to go in more places than just OpenAI.

That's not enough.

If we combined all the available private equity firms in the top 10, all of the available US VC,

that's not enough to pay for all the bills that

OpenAI has said.

We're in a fucking bubble, man.

Come on.

Sure.

I also get that there's more than 10 private equity firms and there's more venture money and that they could raise more money from LPs.

But what's left exactly?

Another 150, 200, 300 billion?

They need that.

They need all of that.

Hand that over to Clammy Sammy right now.

Clammy needs to give that money to Jensen.

Jensen needs money.

Number go up, you asshole.

Give money to Jensen Wong now.

So today's show is brought to to you with support from Square, who I really love.

They offer quick payment processing, really easy-to-use terminals.

Everything spins up really quickly.

Every store I use them in, I don't really think about the experience, which is exactly what I want from any kind of tech.

The loyalty programs work really easily.

They're over at Court Street Grocers, SP, Van Lu and Ice Cream.

They're just a very easy-to-use and straightforward piece of tech.

I can't recommend them enough.

I've heard great things from businesses using them, and as a customer, never upset to see them in a store.

Square keeps up so you don't have to slow down get everything you need to run and grow your business without any long-term commitments and why wait right now you can get up to 200 off square hardware at square.com slash go slash better offline that's sq u a r e dot com slash go

slash better offline Run your business smarter with square.

Get started today.

Homeowners, if you want to sell your house fast for all cash, stop what you are doing and listen to this because Osborne Homes wants to buy your house right now.

I'm Alec from Osborne Homes and we want to buy your house.

Nobody buys more homes in California than Osbourne.

Whether it's a total fixer upper or in perfect condition, Osborne Homes is the easiest way to sell your house fast, all cash.

Best of all, when you sell your house to Osborne Homes, there are zero commissions, zero fees, plus no banks, no realtors, no repairs, and no waiting to close.

We buy your house as is all cash.

Just go to osbournehomes.com right now to get your free, no obligation, all cash offer.

We are here and ready to buy your house 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Just go to osbornhomes.com.

Go to osbornhomes.com right now.

Don't wait.

Sell your house to Osborne Homes and put the cash in your pocket right away.

Just go to osbornhomes.com.

That's osbornehomes.com.

Osbornhomes.com.

Osbornehomes.com

Run a business and not thinking about podcasting?

Think again.

More More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora.

And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined.

So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message.

Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio.

Think podcasting can help your business?

Think iHeart.

Streaming, radio, and podcasting.

Call 844-844-iHeart to get started.

That's 844-844-iHeart.

Your global campaign just launched.

But wait, the logo's cropped.

The colors are off.

And did Legal clear that image?

When teams create without guardrails, mistakes slip through.

But not with Adobe Express, the quick and easy app to create on-brand content.

Brand kits and lock templates make following design guidelines a no-brainer for HR sales and marketing teams.

And commercially safe AI, powered by Firefly, lets them create confidently so your brand always shows up polished, protected, and consistent everywhere.

Learn more at adobe.com/slash go/slash express.

You see, OpenAI needs to buy those GPUs and it needs to build those data centers and it needs to pay its thousands of staff and marketing and sales costs too.

While OpenAI likely wouldn't be the ones raising the money for the data centers, and honestly, I'm not sure who would at this point.

Somebody is going to need to build 20 fucking gigawatts of data centers if we're going to believe Oracle and Nvidia.

You may argue that venture funds and private equity funds can raise more, and you're right.

But at this point, there have been few meaningful acquisitions of AI companies and zero exits from the billions of dollars put into data centers.

How are they meant to justify doing this other than me need money, please?

Even OpenAI admits in its own announcement about new Stargate sites that this will be a $400 billion investment over three years.

Where the fuck's the money coming from?

Is OpenAI really going to absorb massive chunks of all available private credit and venture capital and capex from major tech companies for the next few years?

And oh my fucking God.

Oh my god.

Stop saying the the US government will bail this out.

I'm tired of hearing it.

I get that things are scary right now.

I'm scared too.

We're all fucking scared.

But I get jumping to doomerism, but stop.

The US government actually really can't afford to do this.

Open AI needs about a trillion dollars in the next four years.

And while the US government has spent equivalent sums in the past to support private businesses, There's about $440 billion dispersed during the Great Recession's TARP program, and that was when the Treasury bought toxic assets from investment banks to stop them from imploding, like Lehman Brothers.

That one.

It's hard to imagine any case where OpenAI is seen as vital to the global financial system and the economic health of the US as the actual banking system.

And even if they were, that's more money than they can easily mobilize, even for the US government.

And sure, we spent around a trillion dollars, if we're being specific, $953 billion, on the paycheck protection program during the COVID era.

That was to keep people employed at a time when the economy outside of Zoom and Walmart had, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist.

There was an urgency that doesn't apply here.

If OpenAI goes tits up, SoftBank, Dragoneer, and a few others lose a bit of money, nothing new there, and Sachin Nadella has to explain why he spent tens of billions, actually hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers fields with GPUs.

But otherwise,

you can't really bail this out.

Are we going to nationalize NVIDIA?

Are we going to create a top fund just for OpenAI?

If you really believe that will happen, I really must put a smile on your face.

It can't.

Even under the most crony capitalism scenario, this is more money than actually really exists in the world.

And yes, while there will be, and have been already, disastrous economic consequences, they won't be as systematically catastrophic as that of a pandemic or a global financial crisis.

To be clear, it'll be bad, but not as bad.

And there's also the problem of a moral hazard.

If the government steps in, what's to stop big tech chasing its next fruitless rainbow?

And of course the optics.

If people resented bailing out the banks after they acted like gamblers and lost, how will they feel bailing out fucking Sam Altman and Jensen Huang?

Seriously, no matter when you've got a conservative or democrat government, this is not going to be an easy thing to sell.

It's going to be hard to get the consensus.

And indeed, every tech company will be kind of pissed.

I think that

you underestimate how upset companies that have died will be.

And indeed, companies outside of tech, too.

This would be more than a scandal.

It would be genuinely bad to do, even for the silliest government in the world.

I don't think it's happening.

And even if they tried, there's not enough money.

Breathe, breathe Edward.

They can't get you.

You're doing a podcast.

Look, this has been a slog, and I appreciate you sticking with me this long, but the significance of the bubble requires this depth.

There's little demand, little real money, and little reason to continue, and the sheer lack of responsibility, along with the willingness to kneel before the powerful, fills me full of angry bile.

I understand many journalists are not in a position where they can just write, this shit sounds stupid, but we've entered a deeply stupid era.

And by continuing to perpetuate the myth of AI, the media guarantees that retail investors and regular people's 401ks will suffer.

It is now inevitable that this bubble bursts.

Deutsche Bank has said that the AI boom is unsustainable outside of tech spending remaining parabolic, which it says is highly unlikely.

And Bayne Capital has said that $2 trillion in new revenue is needed to fund AI scaling.

And even that math is completely fucked as it talks about AI-related savings.

And I quote, even if companies in the US shifted all of their on-premises IT budgets to the cloud and reinvested the savings from applying AI in sales, marketing, customs, support, and RD into capital spending on new AI data centers, the amount would still fall short of the revenue needed to fund the full investment, as AI's compute demands grow at more than twice the rate of Moore's Law, Bain notes.

Even when stared in the face by a ridiculous idea, $2 trillion of new revenue in a global software market, and this is all software, that's expected to be around $817 billion in 2025, Bain still oinks out some nonsense about the savings from applying AI.

Yet another myth perpetuate, I assume, to placate the fucking moron sinking billions into this.

Every single Vibe Coding is the future, the power of AI, an AI job story written perpetuates a myth that will only lead to more regular people getting hurt when the bubble bursts.

Every article written about OpenAI or NVIDIA or Oracle that does not explicitly state that the money doesn't exist, that the revenues are impossible, that one of the companies involved burns billions of dollars and has no path to profitability, is an act of irresponsibility, an irresponsible make-belief and mythos.

Look, I'm nobody.

I'm not a financier.

I'm not anybody special.

I write a lot, I read a lot, and can do the most basic maths in the world.

I'm not trying to be anything other than myself, nor do I have an agenda other than the fact that I like doing this and I hate how this story is being told.

I never expected my newsletter to get big, nor did I expect this podcast, nor did I expect to be in the financial times.

But here I am and I'm working my ass off.

And I am pissed off at where this has got to.

I'm tired that things remain honestly mythical.

That we still see as things get more and more ridiculous.

That the headlines get more ridiculous too.

That there's questioning and people are saying, oh, the narrative is shifting.

Sure, but they're still repeating increasingly dumb shit.

And I also believe that the way to stop this happening again is to have a thorough and well-sourced explanation of everything as it happens, ripping down the narratives as they're spun and making it clear who benefits from them and how and why they're choosing to do so.

When things collapse, we need to be clear about how many times people chose to look the other way or to find good faith ways to interpret bad faith announcements and leaks.

So, how could we have seen this coming?

I don't know.

Did anybody try to fucking look?

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 easy at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter.

I also really recommend you go to chat.where's your ed.at to visit the Discord and go to r/slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit.

Thank you so much for listening.

Better Offline is a production of CoolZone Media.

For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is an iHeart Podcast.