So, Sam Altman, the king of the AI castle, admits that parts of his industry are "kind of bubbly." That's like the captain of the Titanic admitting the ship is "a little damp."
Give me a break.
We're not in a bubble. We're in a meticulously crafted financial illusion, a shell game being played with billions of dollars where the only thing being produced at scale is hype. And while the CEOs and venture capitalists sit around congratulating each other, they’re building a house of cards on a foundation of circular logic and funny money. The whole thing stinks, and I’m getting tired of pretending it’s the smell of innovation.
The Money-Go-Round
Let's get down to brass tacks. You have Nvidia, the company making the AI chips, investing a fortune into OpenAI. Then, OpenAI, flush with new cash, announces plans to buy billions of dollars' worth of... well, what do you think? Chips and equipment. This isn't business; it's a perpetual motion machine for generating headlines and juicing valuations. Nvidia gives OpenAI money, OpenAI gives it back to Nvidia for hardware, and both companies' valuations magically soar. Everybody wins, except anyone who believes this represents real, organic demand.
It’s the financial equivalent of a dog chasing its own tail, except the dog somehow gets richer with every lap.
Nvidia’s boss, Jensen Huang, went on TV to say OpenAI isn't required to buy his tech with the investment. Oh, offcourse not. They can "use it to do anything they like." Sure they can. And I can use my rent money to bet on the ponies. The unspoken understanding hangs thick in the Silicon Valley air: you don't take a king's gold and then go buy weapons from his enemy. Are we really supposed to believe Altman is going to take a giant check from Nvidia and then turn around and make their rival, AMD, his primary supplier? It ain't happening.
This is just vendor financing with extra steps. It's a tactic straight out of the dot-com bust playbook, and the fact that people keep bringing up Nortel—the Canadian giant that imploded after loaning money to its own customers to buy its products—should be a five-alarm fire drill. Instead, everyone just nods along as if this is totally normal. This is just irresponsible. No, 'irresponsible' is too polite—it’s a calculated deception designed to create a market that doesn't actually exist yet.
Exporting the Illusion
And now they're taking this show on the road. OpenAI is knocking on Canada's door, peddling the snake oil of "digital sovereignty." The pitch is as cynical as it is brilliant: OpenAI, an American company with massive US government contracts, wants to help other countries become less dependent on American tech.
You can't make this stuff up.
Chan Park, OpenAI's policy guy, talks about building an AI ecosystem "rooted in Canadian values." What does that even mean? Does the AI apologize before it takes your job? The real concern, which Canadian experts are rightfully pointing out, is the US CLOUD Act. This lovely piece of legislation basically says that if a US company holds your data, the US government can get its hands on it. It doesn't matter if the server is in Toronto or Timbuktu.
Microsoft executives already admitted to the French government that they "cannot guarantee" data sovereignty to EU countries because they're bound by US law. So when OpenAI promises to build a sovereign Canadian AI, what they really mean is they'll build a Canadian branch office of the American data empire. How much trust are we willing to put in these companies? Have we learned nothing? It reminds me of the endless cookie notices I have to click through every day—a meaningless gesture of control while in the background they do whatever the hell they want with your information anyway.
They want us to believe it's about progress and partnership, but really... it's about market capture. It's about getting countries hooked on their infrastructure so that when the dust settles, they're the only dealer in town. What happens to a nation's "sovereignty" when its entire digital brain is owned by a foreign company that answers to a foreign government?
Rust in the Desert
Maybe the most damning part of this whole charade is the physical reality of it. While the money flies around in abstract digital space, they are building very real, very enormous things out here in the physical world.
Early AI entrepreneur Jerry Kaplan paints a grim picture: "enormous data centres in remote places like deserts, that will be rusting away and leaching bad things into the environment." OpenAI is looking to build a $500 billion, 10-gigawatt complex in Texas. A 10-gigawatt complex. That's enough electricity to power a small country, all to fuel an industry that has yet to turn a consistent profit and is propped up by its own investors buying its own products.
This is the ultimate end-game of the bubble: not just a stock market crash, but a landscape littered with the decaying monuments of our collective delusion. Ghost towns of servers and cooling pipes in the middle of nowhere.
It forces you to ask the real questions that the boosters and billionaires never want to answer. Who's on the hook to clean up a 10-gigawatt ghost town in the Texas desert when the funding evaporates? When the bubble bursts, and it will, who is left holding the bag for these "man-made ecological disasters"? The investors and builders, as Kaplan says, "will be long gone."
They'll have cashed out, leaving behind a legacy of rust, toxic waste, and a public that was sold a fantasy.
So, What's the Real Product Here?
Let's be brutally honest. For most of the players in this game, the product isn't what is artificial intelligence. The product is the stock price. The product is the valuation. The product is the narrative. It’s a financial instrument wrapped in the language of utopian progress. They are selling shares in a future that may never arrive, fueled by money that’s just looping back on itself. And when the music stops, most of us are going to find out we were just the exit liquidity.
