Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta to spend $1 trillion in 2027 on AI

Ed Zitron: “…AI Revenues Are Pathetic and Circular, With OpenAI Representing 71%+ Of Microsoft’s AI Run Rate and Anthropic 80% of Amazon’s. While Meta and Google refuse to actually explain their AI returns, Microsoft revealed that it had $37 billion in AI revenue run rate — $3.08 billion a month or so — and Amazon had $15 billion, or around $1.25 billion a month. And I must be clear, that’s revenue, not profit. In any case, I need you to recognize how small these numbers are in comparison to the capex it’s taken to make them.  To give you some context, Amazon’s AI revenue run rate is roughly 0.419% of the $298 billion in capex it spent on AI capex so far, or around 25% of the $5 billion it just invested in Anthropic last week. Microsoft, on the other hand, has spent $293.8 billion on AI capex through its latest quarter — making its revenue run rate around 1.04% of its spend. These revenues are deeply embarrassing! I am not sure why this isn’t the common refrain! These f**cknuts have spent over a trillion dollars on AI and all they have to show for it is either nothing, vague statements about “everything lifting because of AI,” or pathetic revenues that only get worse the more you think about them. OpenAI Represents 70%+ Of Microsoft’s AI Revenue and 80%+ Of Its AI GPU Compute Capacity, Creating The Illusion Of Growth That’s Dependent On A Company That Will Lose $25 Billion+ In 2026. For example: even if Microsoft were to make $37 billion in AI revenue in 2026 — remember, that $37 billion run rate is a snapshot in time! — that would still be $500 million less than the $37.5 billion it spent in capital expenditures in the fourth quarter of 2025. Yet things actually get worse when you think about the sources of that revenue, or perhaps I should say source, as both Microsoft and Amazon (and I’d argue Google too, but we don’t know its AI revenues) are heavily-dependent on their large, unsustainable sons — Anthropic and OpenAI. I’ll explain. Microsoft claims that its $37 billion in AI revenue run rate has grown by 123% year-over-year, which means its run rate, not actual 2025 AI revenue, was about $16.59 billion in Q3 FY25, or around $1.38 billion a month or, if you assume that number is consistent over the quarter (it likely wasn’t), about $4.14 billion. Based on my own reporting from direct Azure revenue numbers, this would make OpenAI’s $2.947 billion in inference spend in that quarter around 71% ($11.7bn) of Microsoft’s Q3 FY2025 AI revenue run rate…”