ALT It has been four god damn years, and none of the hyperscalers will say, with complete clarity, on a quarterly revenue-generating basis, how much AI is making them. It would be the easiest thing in the world for Microsoft or Google to say “AI GPU sales made us $X this quarter,” and even easier to say how much of that came from renting to Anthropic and OpenAI, which makes me fundamentally believe that both of those customers, as I’ve estimated before, make up the majority of all AI revenues for hyperscalers. The other problem is that I think Google and Microsoft in particular are double-counting AI revenues. While Microsoft 365 flows into the “agents and infra” segment on Microsoft’s earnings, now that it features “Copilot” in effectively every SKU, MIcrosoft could (and would) consider it “AI revenue” even though most of the value comes from using Word or Excel. Google has done the same thing with Google Workspace, forcing Gemini into every imaginable crevice as a means of saying that
ALT All of this is to say that there’s also very little that hyperscalers can do to inspire a reversal against the current ultra-dump everyone’s facing. Sure, there could be a recovery rally, sure, OpenAI or Anthropic could share some new, ever-more-spurious annualized run rate figure, but to return to the pornographic heights of even a month ago would require something far more inspiring. The fact that the vast majority of those working in the AI industry do everything they can to obfuscate the truth — declining to share AI revenues, using run rates, refusing to share actual available capacity, and so on — suggests that the reality of the picture is grimmer, smaller and more expensive than we could ever imagine. I sure wouldn’t want to be launching an IPO in this climate. Good luck Dario!