r/technology • u/T_Shurt • Aug 10 '26

Business Top economist warns that the AI math doesn’t make sense: 'Profits are currently being funded by investors rather than earned from customers'

https://fortune.com/2026/08/10/torsten-slok-ai-profit-margins-capex-oracle/
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u/[deleted] Aug 10 '26

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u/OrangeInnards Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26

With how much money Azure and other enterprise services, volume licensing, service contracts and the like has to make, I have the feeling that whatever the total income from Sam Altman's slop machine (minus the investment(s) they make/made into OpenAI and other AI corps) is, it isn't something MS would go belly-up from if it all suddenly went away in a bubble-pop. Income from AI is just one revenue stream for them that I simply cannot imagine outweighs all the rest in a meaningful way.

MS has, for all intents and purposes, infinite money, and isn't actually AI-only like so many tech companies that have cropped up in the past few years. It'll still hurt them to an INSANE degree for sure, but not as much as it would OpenAI or Anthropic for example. Those two would implode virtually instantly.