Four Horsemen of the AIpocalypse

Source: Where’s Your Ed At Date: 2026-04-21 URL: https://www.wheresyoured.at/four-horsemen-of-the-aipocalypse/

Summary

Ed Zitron identifies four structural warnings that the AI bubble is unwinding:

1. Service degradation from major AI companies — price increases and reliability problems signal cash shortages
2. Data center collapses — infrastructure projects failing before completion (only 15.2GW of 114GW promised capacity under construction)
3. Economic realities surfacing — companies spending 10% of engineering headcount on AI inference, approaching 100%
4. Revenue transparency crises — “contracted ARR” accounting tricks booking multi-year discounted deals as current revenue

Core thesis: the AI industry is fundamentally unprofitable and survives through subsidies and misleading financial reporting. NVIDIA claims $1T in sales visibility through 2027 while GPUs sit warehoused. Once subsidies end — already beginning with Microsoft token-based billing and Anthropic tier adjustments — the model collapses.

Implications

Strongest structural bear case to date. Connects the Microsoft Copilot billing change, Anthropic’s brief Claude Code Pro removal, and the general pricing pressure into a single thesis: the subsidy era is over and there’s nothing underneath. The “Four Horsemen” framing will get traction because it names specific, observable signals rather than making abstract predictions. Worth tracking whether the horsemen actually arrive as described.