iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

This is now a sycophancy test. Joking about it I’ll accept, barely, but anyone who even remotely indulges this is a coward

771289250

Reposted by Ed Zitron

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 19h

Free newsletter: When will the AI bubble burst? When the money runs out. Raising debt for AI data centers is becoming untenable, infrastructure break-even points keep getting further away, and many of VC's AI investments look like dead money. www.wheresyoured.at/dead-money/

wheresyoured.at

https://www.wheresyoured.at/dead-money/

If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter, and you can subscribe on the following links: $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month. In return you get a weekly premium…

16478112

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 15h

genuinely useless to give this number without defining A) what run rate means and B) what period it refers to

1734039

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 19h

Per Reuters, Anthropic has $252 billion in non-cancelable compute obligations across Microsoft, Google and Amazon, and $161.2 billion in Broadcom TPU lease obligations that are "largely non-cancelable". Truly insane. $413 billion in non-cancelable contracts. www.reuters.com/business/ant...

The company said it plans to spend at least $111.1 billion with Alphabet's (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Google, $110 billion with Amazon (AMZN.O), opens new tab and $31.4 billion with Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab under long-term infrastructure service obligations over the next seven to 10 years "regardless of ⁠usage."
Anthropic is separately carrying about $161.2 billion of Broadcom (AVGO.O), opens new tab-related equipment lease obligations that are largely non-cancelable, according to the prospectus. Anthropic filed for an IPO confidentially with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June but its paperwork has not been publicly disclosed.

Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the filing.
The company said it committed to pay Google between April 2026 and July 2033 and Amazon between May 2026 and April 2036.
"If our actual spend falls short, we must pay Google the difference," the company said, adding that similar terms apply to its Amazon agreement.
It added its commitment with Microsoft of $31.4 billion between November 2026 and May 2033 "is non-cancelable except in the event of Microsoft's uncured material breach."

2640574

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 19h

wheresyoured.at

https://www.wheresyoured.at/dead-money/

If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter, and you can subscribe on the following links: $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month. In return you get a weekly premium…

16478112

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 29/09/2026

So far the only retort from the AI boosters appears to be “2025 doesn’t matter” and I’m not kidding

25853109

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 29/09/2026

Based on my own reporting on OpenAI's audited financials from 2025, it appears that Anthropic was a worse business (at least in that year), spending $2.75 make $1 versus OpenAI spending $2.60 to make $1. So many people told me this company was "more profitable"! www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-op...

OpenAl Lost $38.5 Billion In 2025
2025 — OpenAl Had $13.07 Billion In Revenue, $34 Billion In Costs and Expenses, and $20.92 Billion In Losses, with a net loss attributable to the company of $38.53 Billion
• Revenue: $13.07 billion
• Cost of Revenue: $7.5 billion
• Research and Development: $19.18 billion
• Sales and Marketing: $5.73 billion
• General and Administrative: $1.57 Billion
• Total Costs and Expenses: $34 billion
• Loss from Operations: $20.92 billion

The Al lab spent $7.33 billion on compute and infrastructure last year, a threefold surge from 2024, accounting for more than half of its
$12.65 billion in total operating expenses.

21629136

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 29/09/2026

If you have the Anthropic S-1, please message me at ezitron.76 on signal, i will protect your identity

436757

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 29/09/2026

Reuters got some of the IPO docs. Anthropic is a total dog of a company. Spent $12.6bn to make $4.6bn in revenue in 2025, $7.33bn of which was compute costs. Operating loss of $8bn. Losses getting worse year over year. Amazing stuff www.reuters.com/business/fin...

Summary
Companies
• Anthropic IPO could value the company at more than $2
trillion
• Anthropic lost $42 billion in 2025
• Al lab spent $7.33 billion on compute and infrastructure last year
• Operating loss widened to $8.06 billion in 2025 from $2.98 billion in 2024
• Execs, industry analysts have expressed concerns over harms of Al tech
Sept 28 (Reuters) - Anthropic is making a massive bet that Al will transform the global economy more profoundly than industrialization, electricity and the internet, according to its IPO prospectus seen by Reuters.
But the cost to get there will be staggering. Anthropic reported a net loss of $42 billion in 2025, and plans to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations in coming year, according to the
prospectus.

17141011366

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 28/09/2026

Cannot insist you listen to this enough, this conversation condenses everything going on with AI and its wider economic effects tightly. One of the best in the show’s history.

743576

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 28/09/2026

The greatest secret in finance is that nobody knows what they’re investing in and another is that a lot of the “very smart people” with “lots of data” base their powerful “financial models” based on extremely simplistic scenarios, many of them as obvious as “growth continues as it always has”

1052953

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 28/09/2026

I’m increasingly of the belief that we’ve never truly left the Great Financial Crisis. Everything we’re dealing with today started there, and every excess and problem stems from the US government’s failure to contain or eradicate its causes.

521812304

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 28/09/2026

@robinwigglesworth.ft.com best email? Want to invite you to tell the better offline listeners about bonds.

5911

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 28/09/2026

AI has lost the Mandate of Heaven I’m afraid. WSJ saying it’s a “when” the ai bubble bursts. SNL dabbing on their biggest names for being weird. FT says 50% of chips sold in 2026 and 2027 have nowhere to go. Hundreds of billions short on revenue for even 10% ROIC. A disaster.

332232413

Reposted by Ed Zitron

Spencer Ackerman @attackerman.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Ha ha that’s gross and should make everyone uncomfortable, anyway, Rahm presided over a Chicago police black site, lied about what it was and then I sued the Chicago police for its records that proved it:

theguardian.com

Homan Square revealed: how Chicago police 'disappeared' 7,000 people

Exclusive: Lawsuit exposes scale of detention at off-the-books interrogation warehouse while attorneys describe find-your-client chase ‘from a Bond movie’

9147351719

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 26/09/2026

Joined the Times Tech Report to talk about the $200bn+ NVIDIA GPUs sitting in warehouses, and how Oracle issuing a force majeure notice over expected delays to its data center project in New Mexico is a wrench in basically every AI data center debt deal. youtu.be/1CbvhJO8Nfo?...

youtu.be

Hyperscalers are hiding a massive secret about uninstalled GPUs | Ed Zitron

YouTube video by The Tech Report

426751

Reposted by Ed Zitron

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 25/09/2026

Premium newsletter: This is part two to my Hater's Guide To AI debt, a massive guide to how skyrocketing treasury yields, investor anxiety and ever-expanding data center costs have made "AI factories" economically unviable - even if they had demand. www.wheresyoured.at/premium-the-...

wheresyoured.at

Premium: The Hater's Guide To AI Debt (Part 2)

The year is 2026, and you are a hyperscaler CEO. You zip up your Patagonia Vest, type UDPATE CALENDER WHERE WHY to your Muse agent, and it tells you that your CFO has sent you an email about…

527156

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 25/09/2026

Analysts from UBS, Barclays and Wells Fargo expect — by which I mean they are setting expectations — that Anthropic and OpenAI will account for at least $444 billion of hyperscaler earnings in the next three years. Without that spend, the revenue isn't there. www.wheresyoured.at/concentratio....

That spike in costs comes from Stephen Ju of UBS’ estimates, and even if you think that’s a little high, I would estimate that the $250 billion of commitments made by OpenAI alone on Microsoft Azure will likely mean Microsoft is expecting tens of billions more than $52.5 billion in FY27 and beyond.

I also need to express how much more money this is than these companies are already spending on compute.

In 2025, OpenAI spent (per my own reporting, assuming 50% of sales and marketing was compute expenses) a little over $29.5 billion on compute. Per The Information’s reporting, it spent $12.1 billion (with no affordance for sales and marketing) in the first quarter of 2026, and while we don’t know how much it spent in Q2 (when revenues grew by $1 billion quarter-over-quarter), it’s fair to assume that it’ll spend another $12 billion or so a quarter for the rest of the year, for a total of $48.4 billion, which is less than the $50 billion it said it expected to spend on compute in 2026.

Per Barclays and UBS, OpenAI is projected to spend $15 billion on AWS and $12.5 billion on Google Cloud in 2027, with Wells Fargo estimating it will spend $22.9 billion for the first two quarters of 2027 making it reasonable to assume at least $45 billion, for a total of $72.5 billion… which, even then, seems a little low based on what it’s already on track to spend in 2026.

Then you have to add in another $30 billion from Oracle’s $300 billion, five-year-long deal with OpenAI, which the Wall Street Journal reports is expected to drive $30 billion in revenue starting in 2027, though my own research found that it could be more than $50 billion or $60 billion

517331

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 25/09/2026

Here's this week's monologue. I talk about how $200bn-$300bn of AI GPUs are sitting in warehouses, how hyperscalers are overstating their AI capacity, and why the AI overbuild is magnitudes worse than the Dot-Com era's "dark fiber." www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFu5... linktr.ee/betteroffline

youtube.com

Monologue: The AI Data Center Overbuild | Better Offline

YouTube video by Better Offline

415425

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 25/09/2026

wheresyoured.at

Premium: The Hater's Guide To AI Debt (Part 2)

The year is 2026, and you are a hyperscaler CEO. You zip up your Patagonia Vest, type UDPATE CALENDER WHERE WHY to your Muse agent, and it tells you that your CFO has sent you an email about…

527156

Reposted by Ed Zitron

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 24/09/2026

Had Paul Kedrosky back on the show to talk about how AI is distorting the bond markets to the point that it’s changing the price on US Treasuries, how AI data center economics don’t make sense, and the troubling things he’s hearing out of Anthropic. youtu.be/7boszzOAeJw?... Linktr.ee/betteroffline

youtu.be

The Hidden Recession Beneath The AI Bubble w/ Paul Kedrosky | Better Offline

YouTube video by Better Offline

1130759

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 25/09/2026

Walked by here and they had saved some of you a table

Loser's Eating House
4.2 女文女女大（114）•田39 min
Bakery • $10-20
Closed • Opens 8:30 AM Fri
Saved in Nyc

2372859

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 24/09/2026

youtu.be

The Hidden Recession Beneath The AI Bubble w/ Paul Kedrosky | Better Offline

YouTube video by Better Offline

1130759

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 24/09/2026

Forgot to mention but I do a football podcast with @birdrespecter.bsky.social and @arif.bsky.social! Please listen

3977

Reposted by Ed Zitron

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 22/09/2026

Free newsletter: I estimate that ~50% of AI chip sales - $200bn to $300bn+ - are sitting in warehouses, with NVIDIA selling hundreds of billions of GPUs years in advance. Data centers take way longer to build than hyperscalers are leading us to believe. www.wheresyoured.at/wherere-all-the-ai-chips/

wheresyoured.at

https://www.wheresyoured.at/wherere-all-the-ai-chips/

If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter, and you can subscribe on the following links: $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month. In return you get a weekly premium…

29839213

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 24/09/2026

Larry Ellison when he needs to pay a data center lease

1044933

Reposted by Ed Zitron

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 24/04/2026

Premium Newsletter: OpenAI needs to raise or make $852 billion through 2030 to pay for its compute costs, and must pay $75bn a year for Oracle's 7.1GW of Stargate data centers, or Oracle will collapse, destroying its share price and Larry Ellison's entire empire. www.wheresyoured.at/how-openai-k...

wheresyoured.at

Premium: How OpenAI Kills Oracle

Soundtrack — Brass Against — Karma Police It was January 21, 2025. Per The Information, Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, had just flown to Washington DC from Florida, and had to borrow a coat “...so he...

45897184

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 24/09/2026

They should add relegation to Major League Baseball, and, more importantly, promotion. When you get relegated you swap stadium with a minor league team. Don’t ask me how the contracts work. That’s Rob Manfred’s problem.

2334313

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 24/09/2026

This may end up being the most consequential story I’ve written, or one of them. “How many AI data centers are actually functional” is the most obvious question of the bubble - and the most important answer to understand what’s going on - yet answering it with any specificity has taken years.

12842235

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 24/09/2026

People are humouring and cheering on the founder of Quibi for a dumb essay about AI and Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta (a $1.9 trillion market cap company) just launched an expensive successor to the tamagotchi with an LLM attached. Everyone's asleep at the wheel and the tech industry is washed.

1661655

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 24/09/2026

Another scoop brought to me by an intrepid listener/reader...ezitron.76 on Signal if you would like to leak anything from the tech industry, product or revenue or finances wise, I am always listening.

029118

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 24/09/2026

I think that he should've had Altman arrested for running a company committing cybercrimes

261053179

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 23/09/2026

Attempting the jump that Cloud does at the beginning of Final Fantasy 7 and dying the second I get off the ground

1129414

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 23/09/2026

Fidelity’s Director of Global Macro saying that the AI trade has been “dead money” for three months, and that it’s inflationary, meaning (as I’ve discussed multiple times) that the more debt they raise the more expensive debt becomes and the more they build data centers the more expensive it gets

Post
...
Jurrien Timmer @TimmerFidelity
X.com
On the Al front, the trade has been dead money for more than 3 months now. The metrics I am following (token expenditures and GPU lease rates) are all flat to down. The price of memory (DRAM) seems to be the only thing that is still going up.
(1/2)
500
475
450
425
400
375
350
325
300
275
Al Metrics
Daily Data. Source: FMRCo, Bloomberg
• GS Al basket
387
359
56%
283
249
200
175
150
•Silicon Data LLM token expenditure index (50d chg)
•Silicon Data H100 GPU rental index (50d chg)
•Silicon Data A100 GPU rental index (50d chg)
Aug-25 Oct-25 Dec-25 Jan-26 Mar-26 May-26
Nov-24
Jan-25
Feb-25
Apr-25
Jun-25
Data as of 9/20/2026. Past performance is no guarantee of future results
Jul-26
70%|
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
0%
-10%
-20%
-30%
-40%
-50%
-60%
Sep-26
A Fidelity
8:45 PM • 9/22/26 • 32K Views

Jurrien Timmer &
@TimmerFide... 2h S •
Yes, Al will change our lives (for the better l trust) and down the road it may well unleash a productivity miracle that raises the economy's non-inflationary speed limit enough to keep the world's mounting debt burden sustainable. But until then the buildout is inflationary with an unknown return for the companies who are investing trillions into compute. The demand fo capital (equity and debt) from corporates is rising at a $3.3 trillion clip.
(2/2)
$9,000
$8,000
$7,000
$6,000
$5,000
$4,000
$3,000
$2,000
$1,000
$0
-$1,000
-$2,000
$3,000
-$4,000
-$5,000
Crowding Out?
Monthly Data. Source: FMRCo, Bloomberg, Fed FoF Report.
non-financial corporate debt issuance (Sbi) equity share redemptions (buybacks + M&A)
Shading: US deb/GDP
inflation-adjusted
- total corporate net issuance (debt + equity)
housing bubble
+$7,924
bubble
Jun-20, +$6,597
+$3,462
dot.com bubble
Jun-00, +$3,233
+$3,999
Al capex
Jun-26, +$3,251
+$3,129
debt issuance + M&A
debt-equity arbitrage
+$123
-$197
debt-equity arbitrage
-$2.054
$2,175
-US Treasuries held by China
-$3.485
-US Treasuries held by Japan
—US Treasuries held by Fed's SOMA
—US Treasuries & agencies held by US banks
-$2,911
-$3,449
• $4,597
$3,602
$4,800
$2,400
$1,104
$1,200
$618
$600
1997
1999
2001
2003
2005
2007 2009
2011
2013
2015
2017
2019
2021
2023
$300
2025
2027
Data as of 9/20/2026. Past performance is no guarantee of future resuts
2029
•Fidelity
L71
50

221046207

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 23/09/2026

These are the reps of a man living in hell

Workout
Cable Bicep Curls
Sets: 4
Reps: 10
01
80 Ibs
15 reps
RIR
02
80 Ibs
15 reps
RIR
03
80 Ibs
10 reps
RIR
04
70 Ibs
15 reps
RIR
+ Add Set
Cable Hammer Curl
Sets: 3
Reps: 15
01
80 Ibs
15 reps
RIR

02
70 Ibs
14 reps
RIR
03
60 Ibs
15 reps
RIR
+ Add Set
+ Add Exercise
•••
RIR: 0
・・・
RIR: 0
BW
BW

13860

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 23/09/2026

SKATTEBO: Skattebo Football Jaxson, Victory Football COACH: No, Cam, you can't play with Jaxon SKATTEBO: Good Skattebo Play Football Skattebo Depth Chart Quarterback COACH: Cam, he has a knee injury, he's not playing football SKATTEBO: Jealousy Harbaugh

9766109

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 22/09/2026

so funny to watch these margin heavy/asset light businesses add as many layers of opex as possible

629513

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 22/09/2026

he actually said "UN-ACCEPTABLE" and paused for three seconds for laughs, somebody booed

32016

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 22/09/2026

wheresyoured.at

https://www.wheresyoured.at/wherere-all-the-ai-chips/

If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter, and you can subscribe on the following links: $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month. In return you get a weekly premium…

29839213

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 22/09/2026

Buffer is far and away the best social media tool but it has also completely broken twice in the last month, I really do not know what's happening with modern software but it's genuinely distressing

82317

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 22/09/2026

I think people (not talking about Steve here) make a lot of assumptions about the rationality or forethought behind massive deals or investments, and think companies have plans, or strategies. In reality tens of billions can be spent because of the vibes

29771108

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 22/09/2026

This shit is dead as disco. Needs $174 billion in debt to get off the ground and had to pull its IPO because it makes no money and won’t make a dime off OpenAI until, at best, 2028, and that is making a lot of assumptions about OpenAI’s solvency

SB Energy warned in its prospectus that the data centre projects it needs to fulfil its current contracts would require $174bn of investment.
The company said it planned to fund the majority through project-level debt but cautioned that it "may face difficulty securing the quantum of capital required to fund our project pipeline, particularly if the debt capital markets tighten"

2151077

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 22/09/2026

As discussed a few weeks ago, SoftBank portfolio company SB Energy has signed $439 billion in business with SoftBank portfolio company OpenAI, which is also an investor in SB Energy, as well as its largest (and only real) client. It has now pulled its IPO. www.wheresyoured.at/premium-the-...

https://www.wheresyoured.at/premium-the-haters-guide-to-circular-financing-part-two/#:~:text=To%20summarize%2C%20SoftBank

1035348