OpenAI spent $34 billion in 2025 and posted an operating loss of nearly $21 billion.
Seeing those figures made me want to understand what was really going on.
Many times on The Diary Of A CEO, I’ve heard how AI is going to become the most valuable technology in human history. But when I saw those spending figures, I had to ask a very different question: do the underlying economics actually support the story we’re being told?
So I brought in Ed Zitron.
Ed is a technology writer, researcher and one of the most outspoken critics of the current AI boom. He writes *Where’s Your Ed At*, hosts the *Better Offline* podcast and spends an extraordinary amount of time digging through company financials, infrastructure spending and the relationships between some of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley.
His argument isn’t that AI is useless. His argument is that we’ve blurred the line between what these products can do today and the financial expectations we've placed on them.
We discussed things like:
- Why he believes OpenAI could become the centre of a much bigger financial problem.
- The enormous amount of money being spent on data centres and whether the demand exists to justify it.
- How money can move between AI companies, chip companies and cloud providers in ways that make the industry appear healthier than it might really be.
- What could happen to markets, jobs and ordinary investors if the economics eventually stop working.
I’ve had many conversations about how powerful AI could become, but this conversation forced me to look much more closely at the balance sheets underneath the hype.
When trillions of dollars, massive global infrastructure and our economic futures are pinned to one narrative, we have to listen to the person standing on the other side of the room asking if the numbers add up.
Whether Ed turns out to be right or wrong, these are questions everyone paying attention to AI needs to hear.
Out now on all platforms ❤️👊🏾
