A public fight has broken out over whether AI data centers can ever earn back what they cost, and the numbers so far look weaker than the boosters claim — bad news for AI-linked stocks if the gap holds.

• Data centers are being built on the hope of earning $30–50 billion per gigawatt of computing power, but real revenue looks closer to $8–14 billion.
• Anthropic's revenue run rate jumped to $65 billion in a single month, a suspiciously convenient number ahead of a possible stock listing.
• Anthropic has up to 10 more gigawatts coming from Amazon, Google and Broadcom — its sales would have to multiply several times over just to keep up.
• David Sacks calls a glut of unused computing power the main risk, and argues political resistance to new data centers will prevent it — a shaky bet.
• Sacks also says AI demand is growing exponentially, but token usage growth is already slowing down.

Outlook: Anthropic's first public filing, not Nvidia's earnings, will be the real test of whether the AI trade is a bubble.