“In totality, the AI industry seems to have made about $65 billion in revenue (not profit!) in 2025, with I estimate about a third of that being the result of OpenAI or Anthropic feeding money to hyperscalers or neoclouds like CoreWeave, and a billions more being AI startups (funded entirely by VC) feeding money to Anthropic and OpenAI to rent their models.
Even the venture capital scale of AI startups is drastically overestimated. While (as reported by The New York Times) “AI startups” raised $297 billion in the first quarter of 2026, $188 billion of that was taken by OpenAI (which has yet to fully receive the funds!), Anthropic, xAI, and Waymo. In 2025, $425 billion was invested in startups globally, with half of that (about $212.5 billion) going to AI startups, but about half of that ($102 billion) going to Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Scale AI’s not-quite-acquisition by Meta, and Bezos’ Project Prometheus.
The great financial crisis was, as I’ll get into, a literal collapse of how banks, financial institutions, and property businesses operated, with their reckless speculation on a housing market that was only made possible by a craven mortgage industry incentivized to get people to sign at any cost. When people speculated that there was a bubble, articles ran saying that housing was actually cheap, that subprime lending had actually “made the mortgage market more perfect,” that the sky was not falling in the credit markets because unemployment wasn’t going to rise, that subprime mortgages wouldn’t hurt the economy, and that there was no recession coming.”
https://www.wheresyoured.at/premium-ai-isnt-too-big-to-fail/
#AI #TooBigToFail #AIbubble #BigTech