Let AI Burn

Source: Where’s Your Ed At Date: 2026-07-07 URL: https://www.wheresyoured.at/let-ai-burn/

Summary

Ed Zitron argues the AI industry is a financing bubble that should be allowed to collapse rather than be bailed out: he claims OpenAI and Anthropic account for the overwhelming majority of AI compute spend (with non-frontier-lab AI revenue near $20B), that combined capex plans across major tech firms run into the hundreds of billions to ~$1T, and that Nvidia’s practice of backing GPU purchases by renting back unused capacity signals financing circularity rather than organic demand.

Implications

• closed-frontier clock — an outside-critic data point on the capex/revenue gap underlying frontier labs’ spend, relevant context for reading OpenAI/Anthropic announcement cadence against their actual unit economics.
• infra/cost — bears on how sustainable current GPU capex trajectories are; low signal value as a factual source (opinion/polemic piece, numbers are the author’s own synthesis) but worth tracking as a bellwether of bubble-skepticism sentiment.