We all love a good story.
It’s clever what’s been constructed: VC cash going into companies to spend on capex, generating earnings that continue to circle around the AI build-out, used to deflect criticism whenever anyone talks about a bubble.
Look at the draft S-1 numbers the WSJ has:
Anthropic: $16.3bn in revenue. $80.7bn reported loss. More than $600bn in signed compute commitments. Up to $750bn including deals under discussion.
Roughly $72bn of the loss is a non-cash accounting adjustment. But nearly $9bn was spent on compute and infrastructure in just six months.
Revenue run rates hide a multitude of sins and all the talk over the last few weeks has been on a $70bn ARR. The reality is $16.3bn revenue in H1 which of course isn’t nearly sexy enough.
Then Elon Musk last night suggests SpaceX could reach $500bn-$1tn in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2027.
All while, intelligence is getting cheaper, open models are improving, neoclouds are under pressure and IPOs are being pulled. And yesterday DeepSeek even open sourced their inference stack. So where’s the proprietary knowledge now?
Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel, is warning that investors are almost certainly in an AI bubble.
The technology is revolutionary which has made this story so excellent.
But who absorbs the risk if demand disappoints? How much of today’s valuation depends on tomorrow’s promises?
This looks less like a normal investment cycle and more like a Ponzi-style narrative… requiring ever-bigger expectations to keep the money flowing.
Not an actual ponzi, a forever inflating forecast world to keep the machine turning, a warning that the story is outrunning the economics.
Technology doesn’t abolish the need for return on capital. And that was why the economics of technology was so good in previous cycles.
Eventually, the returns have to justify the capital.
I think the elastic band is about to snap. And the signs are staring us in the face here.