1) How much of that revenue growth is driven by VC-backed startups burning through investor cash rather than going concerns paying out of cash flow? Some reports suggest quite a bit (https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-s...)

2) In the slide on data center economics, the pricing calculations are based on an assumption of 50-75% gross margins. But token prices are collapsing faster than serving costs are dropping (https://www.accountingtoday.com/news/tokenomics-firms-see-su...). So margins are trending toward commodity levels. This is consistent with Anthropic's S1, which showed revenue growth slowing faster than cost growth.

>[W]hy would these companies, all bitter competitors, most with very high fiscal discipline and absolute firehoses of double-digit billions of free cash flow per quarter pre-AI, actively do something that would be so destructive to themselves and the world economy?

One might wonder the same thing about the 2008 GFC, the 2000 Internet bubble, the Great Depression, etc. Because their individual incentives are at odds with the global good. Let's just look at the role of private credit. Private credit made overzealous acquisitions during and after the pandemic, to the point that they are all sitting on depreciating assets while owing their investors outsized returns. It sort of made sense when prevailing interest rates were low, but it's untenable now. Investors were starting to ask for their money, and funds were having to shut their window and enforce their contractual withdrawal limits. Enter AI and (more importantly) data centers. This was a deus ex machina that allowed private credit to draw much-needed new capital from insurance trusts and pension funds. They've now made their overall financial position much worse, but have put off the day of reckoning into the future. It's the same reason people get in trouble with loan sharks, they just don't want to go through the pain of acknowledging the institutional loss, which could also mean realizing significant personal losses. (This also goes for some of the major AI players.) As long as they can use OPM to put off the pain, they will.