AI 수요 거품의 실체와 빅테크의 술책

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If you want to get in touch — and especially if you have any juicy information about Anthropic, OpenAI, or any other companies in the AI bubble — hit me up on Signal at ezitron.76. I’m also on IB on The Terminal. Soundtrack: Tool - Forty Six & 2 The question I want to ask anyone reading this who might have invested in or in some way backed the hyperscalers and the greater AI industry: What is it you think you’ve gotten yourself into? Because I think you’re being sold a lie . Last week’s tech earnings saw outlet after outlet claim that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft’s AI bets were “paying off” as their respective cloud segments reported record revenue growth, casually ignoring that none of them have broken out their AI revenues . To add insult to injury, Microsoft decided, after sharing that it had a $37 billion AI run rate (about $3.08 billion a month) in Q3 FY2026 , that it simply didn’t have to share anything about its actual AI payoff in Q4 , realizing that its overall numbers would beguile reporters and analysts — especially those with little interest in what was actually going on as long as the topline stuff looked good. To be clear, all three of these companies’ cloud platforms have many other customers paying for many other things other than generative AI services or AI GPUs, and they’ve all engaged in a combination of multiple outright price increases and changing their core subscriptions to force AI features on them as a means of boosting revenues and conning the street into believing that “AI is paying off” every time they non-consensually thrust it on their customers, framing higher prices as “better value” in a way that fucks the user to appease Wall Street. Yet the biggest con of all is that a vast majority of this revenue growth comes from the compute spend of Anthropic and OpenAI, both of whom account for the vast majority of AI revenues and overall cloud growth we’ve seen in the last few years. Every publication you read right now will tell you that AWS and Azure and Google Cloud are growing like wildfire as a result of the hundreds of billions of dollars they’ve invested in AI GPUs and data centers, when the truth is far simpler: their revenues are being buoyed by two unprofitable, unsustainable AI labs that cannot exist without being funneled tens of billions of dollars each year. And a decent chunk of that money is coming from the hyperscalers themselves. In the last seven months alone, Google has sunk $10 billion (and up to $30 billion more) into Anthropic , with Amazon funnelling $5 billion to Anthropic within a week of that investment and a total of $50 billion into OpenAI . For all the concern about circular financing in the AI world, it’s astonishing that so much attention has (rightly, to be clear) centered on NVIDIA’s backstopping and funding of neoclouds, and less on the fact that hyperscalers are propping up their now biggest customers, giving them cash that will eventually migrate back to the hyperscaler. I’d also argue that the vast majority of their capex exists to support these two load-bearing failsons. A few months ago, a Microsoft executive told the judge during the Musk-Altman trial that its OpenAI relationship had cost it “ over $100 billion ,” including both the $13 billion it sunk into the company and the associated infrastructure. Microsoft has dedicated its Fairwater data centers (however much actually exists) entirely to OpenAI, much like Amazon has for Anthropic with however much of its massive Indiana-based Project Rainier has actually been turned on, and much like Google is in talks to backstop a $15 billion data center project for Anthropic , along with data centers with Cipher Mining and TeraWulf and a $35 billion private credit-funded Broadcom-backstopped deal where Google will sell Anthropic its TPU AI chips, put them in a Google-built data center, and rent them back to Anthropic. I want to spell this out: when you remove Anthropic and OpenAI’s compute spend, I am not confident that Google, Microsoft and Amazon have much of an AI business. While many people believe — largely because the big three refuse to break out their actual AI revenues or disclose their customer concentration — that they have AI revenues coming from a diverse set of different customers, the reality is that their largest cloud customers, let alone AI customers , are two companies that can literally not afford to pay them without a near-infinite flow of venture capital or debt. Analysts Estimate That More Than 70% of Amazon, Microsoft and Google’s AI Revenues Come From OpenAI and Anthropic Per Ross Sandler of Barclays, Anthropic and OpenAI are estimated to make up 73% of all of Amazon’s AI revenues in both 2026 and 2027 and 75% of AI revenues in 2028 , with Anthropic spending $14.1 billion in 2026, $25.3 billion in 2027, and $35.8 billion in 2028, and OpenAI spending $9 billion in 2026, $15 billion in 2027, and $20 billion in 2028. Amazon plans to spend $220 billion in capital expenditures in 2026 and even more in 2027, and appears to be doing so almost-exclusively to provide compute for a company that had to raise $95 billion in funding in the space of six months, with $5 billion of that coming from Amazon itself. Editor’s Note: Just before I headed to press on this piece, I found another note from Stephen Ju (who you’re just about to learn about for the first time) about AWS revenues, with the numbers a little different. He has estimated total AI revenues at around $30.9 billion for 2026, with OpenAI and Anthropic’s compute spend sitting at 59% of those revenues ($18.3 billion) and the remaining $12.6 billion coming from Bedrock, the platform from which Amazon sells access to both TPUs and AI models from Anthropic and (more recently) OpenAI. This revenue concentration improves to 55% in the 2027 estimates. Anyway, the rest of this piece focuses on Sandler’s numbers, as I did not get a ton of time to dig over these. These numbers, while different, do not meaningfully change my perspective. As I’ll argue about Vertex, making money by proxy of having monopoly permission to sell OpenAI and Anthropic’s models absolutely counts as revenue related to Anthropic and OpenAI to me. A chunk of both labs’ revenue comes from the resale of these models, easy money that also becomes another way in which hyperscalers feed their revenues back into the AI labs so that the AI labs can spend the money on compute. I will add that Microsoft no longer pays a revenue share to OpenAI . In any case, the viability, efficacy, and attractiveness of these models are still a product of Anthropic and OpenAI’s ongoing work. Google is in a similar-position. Per Stephen Ju of UBS, “...Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta will account for 21%, 7% and 1% of 2026 Google Cloud revenues, respectively, and 44%, 5% and 1% of 2027 revenues,” or, put another way, 28% of all 2026 and more than 48% of all 2027 Google Cloud revenues are from Anthropic and OpenAI. Ju also estimates Meta will make up a whopping 1% of Google Cloud revenues in each year, and does not mention a sing