Trouble in ParadAIse

On the curious economics of a revolution with two paying customers Every gold rush has its shovel salesmen. The AI boom has improved on the formula. Here the shovel salesmen fund the prospectors, the prospectors spend the funding on shovels, and everyone reports record shovel revenue to a cheering market. The gold itself remains, as ever, forthcoming. That is the case analyzers have been making with escalating volume. Numbers are difficult to laugh off, even when the situation practically begs for it. By Ed Zitron's math, somewhere between 70 and 75 percent of the AI revenue flowing into the cloud businesses of Microsoft, Google, and Amazon comes from exactly two customers - OpenAI and Anthropic. Not two industries. Not two segments. Two companies, both of which lose money with a commitment most startups reserve for their mission statements, and both of which are kept alive by investment from the very hyperscalers booking their spending as growth. Remove those two names and the "AI…