If OpenAI becomes ‘Lehman Brothers of AI bubble’ – What happens to Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle and Amazon?
“The AI bubble is actually an OpenAI bubble,” says AI critic and researcher Ed Zitron, citing the ChatGPT maker as being at the center of today’s AI boom. If it collapses, he warns, it could become “the Lehman Brothers of the AI bubble.”
“OpenAI is the reason everyone cares about AI,” says Zitron. “You can talk all you want about open source models or Anthropic, but without OpenAI the AI industry would not exist and the justification for trillions of dollars of capital spending would evaporate.”
Why might OpenAI fail?
Zitron says that if OpenAI fails, it will be because LLM models are unprofitable. They spend heavily on artificial intelligence infrastructure, but subscription business and advertising revenues do not cover these costs.
“While there are billions of dollars left to raise to pay any of its bills (to build out its AI infrastructure), OpenAI needs tens of billions of dollars several times a year.”
Moreover, OpenAI’s free users have become a huge liability. The Information reported that the company is expected to generate $2.4 billion in advertising revenue in 2026 and $102 billion in 2030, but the reality is much harsher than expected. eMarketer predicts that the entire AI chatbot ad market will generate just $1 billion in revenue this year and $5.41 billion by 2030.
Now if OpenAI collapses, there is no compelling story left for any other AI company. Without OpenAI, investors would view AI labs as financial black holes, and most AI startups are simply repackaging existing AI models without making a profit. According to Zitron, the failure of OpenAI will not only shake up the AI industry, but also the entire stock market, triggering a much larger sell-off and leading everyone to accept that the AI bubble has burst. So how will this affect big tech?
What happens to Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle and Amazon if OpenAI fails?
“First, don’t lump these four together; the question assumes they are all in the same boat at OpenAI and they are not,” Viram Shah, Founder and CEO of Vested Finance, told LiveMint.
- Oracle is the most exposed. A large portion of future cloud revenue is based on a very large contract with OpenAI; So if OpenAI’s spending plans slip, that’s where you’ll feel it most directly.
- NVIDIA and Microsoft are also closely linked to OpenAI. NVIDIA invested in the company and provided it with AI chips; Microsoft is both one of the early investors and OpenAI’s cloud provider. But both companies have many customers, so even though OpenAI is a big account, their business isn’t entirely dependent on it.
- Amazon is the odd one out (although it has invested in Anthropic). It has its own chips and a massive cloud business underneath. So putting Amazon in the ‘OpenAI is floundering’ bucket is overstating it.
Is AI spending resilient despite skepticism?
As for whether the spending is durable, Shah says: “Mostly yes, with a caveat. The big spenders are putting about $700 billion into this in 2026, and what people are missing is that they can afford it.”
These are companies sitting on hundreds of billions of cash with real cash flow, so they’re not fueled by debt like private labs. That’s the main difference. If demand for AI slows, companies like Microsoft and NVIDIA could see lower earnings and weaker investor confidence.
“But the greater financial risk is for AI companies, which are dependent on raising money and recycling it within the AI ecosystem to stay afloat.”
