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Zeitgeist — a spike by Chris Gathercole
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  2. Ed Zitron — Where's Your Ed At / Better Offline/

Premium: The Hater's Guide To Circular Financing (Part Two)

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  • Ed Zitron exposes SB Energy’s S-1 filing as a “pure, unfiltered circular financing operation” within the AI bubble, arguing its IPO valuation is built on theoretical deals with a company (OpenAI) that cannot afford to pay for infrastructure SB Energy cannot yet afford to build.
  • SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary, has a $439 billion revenue backlog, with 99.4% of its future capacity earmarked for OpenAI, but 97% of this revenue is projected to arrive more than four years in the future and is contingent on $178 billion in capital expenditures and data centers not coming online before 2028.
  • The deal involves OpenAI (also an investor in SB Energy) leasing 10GW of future capacity, with NVIDIA backstopping $105 billion only if the infrastructure gets built and other conditions aren’t met, alongside a $3 billion NVIDIA investment and $5.5 billion in warrants to OpenAI.
  • Investors in SB Energy’s IPO are largely investing in “signatures and strips of land” and future promises, not actual built AI data centers or current revenue, indicating an “emperor has no clothes” situation that highlights the extreme risk and brittleness of current AI financing.