The AI spending boom looks like a bubble that could break investors, tech critic Ed Zitron argues, because almost none of the money going into it is coming back out.

• Big Tech has poured over a trillion dollars into AI data centers and chips, but the AI revenue to show for it is tiny by comparison.
• OpenAI and Anthropic account for most of that revenue, and both lose enormous sums — OpenAI lost about $21 billion last year.
• The money is circular: Amazon, Microsoft and Google fund those two companies, who then spend it back on cloud and chips, which makes demand look bigger than it is.
• Users are paying far less than AI actually costs, so heavy users burn thousands of dollars on a $200 subscription; when companies were asked to pay real rates, they balked.
• Microsoft, Google and Amazon still refuse to break out their AI revenue — a silence that says more than the hype does.

Outlook: If AI revenue does not catch up to the spending soon, the reckoning lands on Nvidia, the big cloud companies, and anyone holding their stock.