Comment by stego-tech

Apples and Oranges from an enterprise perspective, with the additional wrinkle that consumer tech is generally ad-supported (ugh) while Enterprise stuff is super-high margin and paid for in actual currency.

If you assume the napkin math is correct on the $800bn yearly needed to service interest rates on these CAPEX loans, then you’d need the collective revenue of the major players (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, etc) to pull in as much revenue in a year as Apple, Alphabet, and Samsung combined.

Let’s assume OpenAI is responsible for much of this bill, say, $400bn. They’d need a very generous conversion rate of 24% for their monthly users (700m) to the Pro plan for an entire year to cover that bill, for one year. That’s a conversion rate better than anyone else in the XaaS world who markets to consumers and enterprises alike, and paints a picture of just how huge the spend from enterprises would need to be to subsidize consumer free usage.

And all of this is just for existing infrastructure. As a number of CEBros have pointed out recently (and us detractors have screamed about from the beginning), the current CAPEX on hardware is really only good for three to five years before it has to be replaced with newer kit at a larger cost. Nevermind the realities of shifting datacenter designs to capitalize on better power and cooling technologies to increase density that would require substantial facility refurbishment to support them in a potential future.

The math just doesn’t make sense if you’re the least bit skeptical.