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AI needs $6tn in annual revenue to justify data centre boom, Bain says | The National
(www.thenationalnews.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2026
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Revenue is not profit. How are they going to pay their debts, for example? 6T in (fantasised) ARR is already about a third of US Fortune 500 total revenue over 2025, 21T. Good luck with that lol.
I guess the $6tn is also including wages not being paid. They think they can just pocket the pros of AI and leave the rest of the world population with the cons. A small analogy. If nobody does large agriculture, there won't be many tractors and tools sold and maintained. There won't be cheap grain to be processed into convenience food, animal feed, booze. With those there won't be food, meat, dairy and eggs for the masses which again needs specialised tools and machinery. You can keep going with this into increasingly miniscule economic sectors.
The point I want to reach is drawing the picture of a propellerheaded youth sawing into the branch on which he is sitting - and with him the whole family of H.Sapiens.
Just another food for thought. Scientists expect the next ice age in 10 millennia but we are about to loose our advanced and highly specialised society to a manmade global warming. We surely won't be dying out anytime soon I believe, but neither will we be to go into that ice age as an advanced society.
Even then. Let’s say that Ed Zitron has all the numbers wrong here and they’re actually double, just for the sake of the argument: that would mean OpenAI and Anthropic would have a current yearly revenue of 164.4b$. (And as said, they don’t!). Even if you double the Meta, Microsoft, Google revenue you’d still be at a mere 260b$. Even hilariously exaggerating the numbers doesn’t even come close to the completely insane 6T!
That's just like my opinion. They think it's worth that because their customers won't need a single employee or very few. In many sectors manpower is the largest recurring position that can't just sit there and be resold like land or a building. Manpower goes "stale" if it isn't productive. A factory with bots can be shut down if needed and rebooted anytime goods or orders accumulate. Creativity can't really be forced and with ai and enough input an "ideal model" of how the product should look like can just be remodeled and repainted to fit the newest trend.
That's what every company might try, ditch their human employees for some ai agent and ai tokens, that might be where the $6tn comes from. A very big bubble blowing up and exploding right after the masses missed their third meal facing food anxiety, desperation, anger and going after anybody that looks vaguely rich to shatter their bones to suck their bone marrow. I hope Elmo gets it first.