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Media hi, I'm Ed Zitron and welcome to Better Offline. Better Offline. That's right folks, we're back for the third Part of our four part series about the terminal stage of the initiatification process, the initiatification of the financial markets. So far we've talked about the initiatification of the stock market, the complicity of the analysts and the media, and how venture capital will be the canary in the coal mine for any eventual collapse. Venture capital is both the perpetrator and the victim of the air bubble. And it's worth exploring how it came to this point. Now hang on, I need a channel voice. Folks, we haven't seen values this big in a long time. Is the biggest numbers we've ever seen. They're simply tremendous. Open airs maybe with 830 billion. Can you believe that they lose so much money? But folks, we don't mind Clammy Sam open, they call him Clamio says everybody is going to give them $1 billion or more. We love him. And data centers are going to have the biggest deals we've ever seen. Even. Even if we have to work with Dario. Sorry to those of you who don't like that voice. It was only about 30 seconds. You see right now, AI startups are big, exciting news for the limited partners funding large language model companies. Things feel exciting because the value of the assets under management AUM are going up, which is nothing dodgy per se, but it's just how VCs value things. And if they're valuing AI stocks, well, that's how their fees are getting paid because the thingies they've invested in are worth more money. And now limited partners are paying them a percentage so they can sit in an apartment that costs too much, not see friends because they just sit online posting for 11 hours a day. Yeah, and then they can lose all the money in the future. I guess Investing early in OpenAI allows a venture capitalist or even an asset manager like Blackstone, which invested in 2024, to say it as a big holding. And a big increase in its AUM AI stocks make venture capitalists who bet on them two years ago look like geniuses. On paper, you got in early on OpenAI, anthropic, cursor, cognition, perplexity, or any other company that loves to burn several dollars per dollar of revenue. You have a big beautiful number, the biggest you've ever seen. And your limited partners need to pay you a fee just to manage it. Venture capital has not seen valuations like this in a long time. And on paper it feels a lot like a lot of VCs got in on companies worth billions of dollars, right? On paper that Is on paper, cognition is worth 10.2 billion. Perplexity 18 billion cursor 29.3 billion lovable 6.6 billion cohere 6.8 billion replit 3 billion glean 7.2 billion massive valuations to companies that all basically do products that OpenAI or Anthropic or Amazon or Google or any number of Chinese companies are already working to clone. They're all losing lots of money too, and have no path to profitability of any kind. But right now, the numbers are simply tremendous, folks. I've heard venture capitalists tell me that there are times when they have to agree to invest with little to no information, or know that they'll lose the opportunity to another sucker. I mean, investor. I've heard venture capitalists say they don't have any insight into finances, but we love the numbers, folks. They're simply tremendous. We love it. Let me tell you how not tremendous they are. I had a source recently suggest that nobody who invested past OpenAI's $100 billion valuation have any information rights. And what that means is they literally do not know anything about the company. They don't know anything other than what the company will tell them. And the company doesn't have to tell him shit. Which means they don't know the revenues, they don't know the costs. They only know what new start, new ridiculous stat. Sarah Fryer, CFO of OpenAI, has farted out. They posted recently that $20 billion annualized revenue. Yeah, I think that's complete nonsense. But they want to do that so that you go, OpenAI made $20 billion in 2025. Fuck that. I don't even think they made 10. Now, venture capitalists would argue, of course. They'd say I'm insane. They would say. They would think me mad. And they would say that the growth is obviously there, while pointing to whatever Startup has made $100 million in annualized recurring revenue, which is $8.3 million a month, by the way, all while not discussing the underlying operating expenses. The idea, I believe, is that the current spate of AI spending is only set to increase the next year, and that will somehow lead to fixing the margins. I think venture capitalists staunchly refuse to learn anything other than invest in growth and then profit from growth, even if profiting doesn't appear to be happening anymore. In reality, venture capital shouldn't have touched LLMs with a shitty stick because the margins were obviously blatantly bad from the very beginning. We knew OpenAI would lose $5 billion in the middle of 2024, the same venture capital climate would have fucking panicked, but instead chose to double, triple and quadruple down. I believe that massive valuation drawdowns are a certainty for AI companies. And by that I mean these companies will end up being revalued and the number will be smaller than the big number everybody fell in love with. Look, venture capitalists, I got to ask you a question. What happens if OpenAI dies? Do you think this will make investors interested in funding or acquiring other AI startups? How much longer are we going to do this? When will venture capital realize it's setting itself up for a disaster? And what exactly is the plan? OpenAI and Anthropic will suck the lakes dry like an Nvidia GPU named after Nancy Reagan. How is this meant to continue? And what will be left when it does? The answer is simple. There won't be any money for venture capital for a while. Those AI holdings are going to be worth, at best, 50% if they retain any value at all. Once one of these startups die, once there's a major casualty, a panic will ensue, sending venture capitalists scrambling to get their holdings acquired, while by which I mean sold to someone else until there's little or no investor interest left. Why would limited partners ever trust venture capital after this? Why would anybody? Because based on the past four years, it doesn't appear that venture capital is actually good at investing money. It just got lucky year after year until there were a few ideas that they could sell for hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. And now we're out of them. We're out. I think we're out. I think there's probably still some. But I think the era of the unicorn might be dead. For a while, venture capital believed it knew better as it turned its back on basic business fundamentals, starting with Clubhouse Crypto, the Metaverse, and now Generative AI. Yet they're far from the only fuckwits on the dickhead express. Because yes, I am going to talk about data centers. Per Bloomberg, there were at least $178.5 billion in data center credit deals in the US in 2025, rivaling the $215.4 billion invested in US venture capital in 2100 and $97.2 billion invested in US venture capital through August 7, 2025, and over a hundred billion dollars more than the $60.69 billion of data center deals done in 2024. That's. That's really worrying. It's like more than more than more than 100% more. I'm very worried and I'm going to tell you why. Using a company called coreweave Corwe that I've been actively warning about, warning people about since March. And I. I get a little crazy around Core Weave because I have had the Core Weave conversation a lot and I've seen people straight up just steal the title of my articles as they come to this realization six to seven months later. But Core Weave is a mess, and Core Weave was obviously always a mess. And everyone has been saying Core Weave's fine because they went public. Core Weave is not fine. All right, let's talk about coreweave. Coreweave is something called a Neo Cloud. It's a company that builds data centers by renting out. And they build data centers, they fill them full of GPUs and they rent them to people. They rent something called AI Compute. And as I explained a few months ago, they do so by building data centers backed by endless debt. And I quote myself, setting up a Neo Cloud is expensive, even if the company in question already has data centers, as Core we've did with its cryptocurrency mining operation. AI requires completely new data center infrastructure to house and cool the GPUs. And those GPUs also need paying for. And then there's the other stuff like power, water, and the other bits of the computer, the cpu, the motherboard, the memory, the storage and the housing and the power supply and all that good stuff. As a result, these Neo Clouds are forced to raise billions of dollars in debt, which they collateralize using the GPUs they already have, along with contracts from customers which they use to buy more GPUs. Core we, for example, has $25 billion in debt on an estimated $5.35 billion in revenue, losing hundreds of billions of doll quarter. You know who also invests in these neo clouds? Nvidia. The people who make the GPUs. Nvidia is also one of Coolweave's largest customers, accounting for 50% of its revenue in 2024, and just signed a deal to buy $6.3 billion of any capacity that Core we've can't otherwise sell to someone else through 2032, an extension of a $1.3 billion deal from 2023 reported by the Information. Oh, and Nvidia was the anchor investor of Core Weave's IPO, putting in $250 million. CoreWeave is also one of the largest providers of AI compute in the world, and its business model is Indicative of how most data center companies make money. In fact, I'd argue that they are probably doing better because they have the backing of everyone. Now, you may think that's a too big to fail thing. Not really. It just means that they're kind of the village bicycle of AI. Compute grossness aside, let me explain how this works. First, CoreWeave signs contracts such as its $14 billion deal with Meta or its $22.5 billion deal with OpenAI before it has the infrastructure to actually service them. It then raises debt using this contract as collateral, orders GPUs from Nvidia. Those take three months to arrive and then another three months to install, at which point monthly client payments begin. And I should also add that that's kind of taken out of deferred revenue that the customer has already put down. To really simplify this, datacenter developers are raising money months up to a year before they ever expect to make a penny of revenue, not profit. In fact, I can find no consistent answer to how long a data center takes to build. And the answer here is pretty important, because that's how the money is going to get made from the data centers building fucking everywhere. You may also notice that monthly payments in the chart that I linked, which I should have mentioned, begin at 6 to 30 months. A curious and broad blob of time. You see, data centers are extremely difficult to build. And the concept of an AI data center is barely a few years old, with the concept of hundreds of megawatts in one data center campus entirely made up of AI JPUs, barely two years old. JPUs, which means basically everybody building one is doing so for the first time. And even experienced developers are running into problems. For example, Core Scientific, Core Weave's weird partner organization it tried and failed to buy. That is truly different. Despite the similar name, has been trying to convert its Denton, Texas cryptocurrency mining data center into an AI data center since November 2024, specifically so that Core Weave can rent it to Microsoft for OpenAI. This hasn't gone well. And this is when things get weird. The Wall Street Journal reported a few weeks ago that Denton had been wrecked with several months of delays thanks to rainstorms preventing contractors and pouring concrete. I'm going with it. It's concrete now. We're calling it concrete. I originally, within this script, wrote down that this was a plausible thing. I thought that this was normal. However, I should add something. This is. This may actually be bollocks. So I'm a. I'm a psycho and I went and I, I looked up weather. I looked up weather in Abilene, Texas and it turns out that there were like 11 days with rain total and there was only, I think on June 3 and September 22 there were rainstorms or thunderstorms of any kind. I think There are only two days where rain was over 0.11 inches. The people I've talked to about this deal are saying it wouldn't be weather, it would actually just be money. Nevertheless, those are things that are stopping them building a 260 megawatt data center. And that's fucking nothing compared to the gigawatts that OpenAI claims to want to build. And what this means by the way, is that Coreweave can't actually get paid by OpenAI because per its contract, customers don't have to stop paying until the compute is actually available. This is a very important deal to know for literally any data center development you've ever heard of or seen.