An investor from "Shorting" identified the Achilles' heel of the AI boom

Investor Steve Eisman, whose contrarian strategy in the housing market on the eve of the global financial crisis was chronicled in *The Short Game*, stated that hyperscalers have developed a dangerous dependence on two AI labs. According to him, OpenAI and Anthropic account for about 70% of the AI-related revenue of Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle. The hyperscalers also derive between 25% and 35% of their cloud revenue from OpenAI and Anthropic.

“In a sense, the future of these huge companies depends on betting that OpenAI and Anthropic will succeed,” Eisman said on CNBC’s *Fast Money*. “The Achilles’ heel of this whole story is that something bad could happen to Anthropic and OpenAI. Chinese open-source models are much cheaper. And if they really start to take a large share of the market—and from what I’m hearing, that’s already starting to happen—a serious price war could break out. And then we’ll have a problem.”

Aisman’s warning has become yet another notable argument in the heated debate over whether the massive expenditures driving the AI boom will yield sufficient returns, according to CNBC. Another investor featured in “The Short Game”—Michael Burry—is fundamentally skeptical that part of the current and future demand for AI comes from end customers. In his view, a significant portion of this demand is financed by schemes he calls “circular.” Burry is backing up his words with his money: he has bet against the stocks of some of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI boom, including Nvidia, and has also disclosed bearish positions related to the semiconductor sector as a whole.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor