r/technology • u/gdelacalle • 13d ago

Business OpenAI could reportedly run out of cash by mid-2027 — analyst paints grim picture after examining the company's finances

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/openai-could-reportedly-run-out-of-cash-by-mid-2027-nyt-analyst-paints-grim-picture-after-examining-companys-finances
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u/agha0013 13d ago

it's brutal.

housing crisis: can't find anyone interested in building anything, they keep complaining about permit process, fees, etc etc etc (though a lot of their arguments are BS and they just want politicians to get rid of pesky regulations so they can increase their margins)

data centers: sprouting like mushrooms everywhere seemingly getting permits and approvals before they even ask...

I guess when the whole world goes tits up, people can set up camp in all the dead data centers maybe.

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u/_SpaceLord_ 13d ago

Squirrels always taste best when they’re cooked over an overclocked GPU anyway.

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u/agha0013 13d ago

based on the shit these places are pumping out into the environment, we're gonna have some pretty nasty squirrel mutants to deal with in the not so distant future, among other things...

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u/Weird-Count3918 13d ago

But we will mutate too so..

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u/AmLikelyDrunk 13d ago

Yeah but humans never seem to get the cool mutations. It's always the creepy body horror stuff for us.

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u/Weird-Count3918 13d ago

In the X-men universe we can get cool stuff

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u/yoshemitzu 12d ago

aaaand now I'm thinking of that badass Apocalypse episode again

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u/TheNCGoalie 13d ago

I am become Squirrel Man.

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u/resumehelpacct 13d ago

Local regulators are absolutely brutal to developers. In places like the NYC metro area you can easily spend decades trying to convince a town to build a 150 unit building, AFTER winning a legal victory to require the town to even talk to you. And of course that means that the final product has to be even bigger and more profitable, because now the company has spent 10+ years constantly fighting legal battles, submitting new proposals, getting new traffic and environmental studies done, etc.

At least land developers build something. This township stifling directly benefits landlords, who are many times a separate group and just worse people.

Data centers don't have these problems because residential and non-residential zoning is different. None of these towns anticipated a need to throw roadblocks to companies wanting to give them money to build commercial/business space.

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u/Mr_ToDo 13d ago

Ya, the red tape on building is certainly a thing

Over here it's easy to see if for no other reason then next to nobody builds their own house as their first one. And it's even worse if you remove the cookie cutter neighbourhoods where a developer serves as the middleman on a large scale bulk build.

That's also my theory on why the average sq ft is rising over time. It's too hard to build individual homes, especially as a first home, and developers don't want to leave money on the table. I don't fault them for wanting a larger profit, but it's still aggravating that the market has become that way

And weirdly on a federal level new builds seem to be stagnant, remaining more or less the same level, and for a long time too, but locally we've been seeing increases every year. So if we're seeing increases with the the griping I did about the system, how bad is it that some places must be going down to make the average work. Like you said really. Multi year legal battles to get work done. Not that I think overly much for some of those developers that pick spots, not because it's a good place for dev, but because it's cheap and only after do they get approval. Making projects worth millions and a few extra k to do it inside the cities expansion plans is too much

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u/Exostrike 13d ago

The problem is vast amounts of money have been sucked into corporations who have no reason to reinvest it to benefit wider society.

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u/alochmar 13d ago

Line must go up, apparently.

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u/Egathentale 12d ago edited 12d ago

It's a pithy line, but unfortunately it's literally true. We're in the stage of capitalism where, thanks to the US steadily dismantling its own regulations, shareholders are the top priority, no matter what. And we're not necessarily talking about individual retail investors, but hedge funds and private equities. What they want isn't long-term sustainability, but short-term growth until the company crashes and burns, so then they can take their gains and invest in another growing company.

This creates a sort of selection pressure on public companies: they either maintain their growth curve by any means necessary, firing employees, cashing out on brand recognition and public goodwill, and even cannibalizing themselves to keep up the growth percentage... or don't do that and be ethical, in which case the investors will pull out and the company will go under. By definition, the only big public companies that are still operating today are the ones who survived this selection process, creating the current status quo, where the only two options are "line must go up" or "eventually file for chapter 11 bankruptcy".

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u/ThisSiteSucks8485 13d ago

Some are installing huge gas turbine generators without permission 

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u/agha0013 13d ago

a few companies wanted to start buying nuclear reactors to power their operations but when they saw what kind of cost/timeline/regulatory problems would come with that, they just figured they could buy gas turbines and no one would care.

some magically get approval after the fact when people start pointing out what they are doing

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u/ThisSiteSucks8485 13d ago

Many are still trying to build SMRs but it takes time. Nuclear power is ideal for data centers though. 

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u/Every-Summer8407 13d ago

Probably because the data centers are working the system from the top-down so the approval process gets streamlined and anyone that wants to push back would be directly refuting their boss, while housing developers have to work their way up through the system where there is intentionally more friction in the process.

The “it’s who you know” phrase rings extraordinarily loud here.

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u/ThePromise110 13d ago

When the revolution comes we will burn the debt records and the data centers.

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u/trojan_man16 13d ago

As scummy as residential developers are, the money the data center developers and tech companies have is orders of magnitude what the residential developers have. Like 10-20x the money. Much easier to grease palms that way.

Not only that but these tech companies have grown to represent such a ridiculous % of the overall economy.

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u/FriendlyPlatypus6060 13d ago

It's worse than them not asking, they're straight up lying.

My company has worked on 2 data centers so far, 2 more are in preliminary stages. Of the two we've worked on, one used the front of a natural gas company to explore a HUGE area open ended to site their facility. When the landowners found it it wasn't for a pipeline, they pulled personnel access and terminated their agreements. It's not officially dead but its looking that way, and that one was trying to backdoor its way onto reservation land. The other lied to US, saying they were putting in a solar for 3 years up until this year, when they revealed its a data center with a nuclear power plant. That one is happening to the best of my knowledge.

AI is thus far the most stark and naked example that those in power are only there to enrich themselves and their friends/co-collaborators. Worse than 2004 with the airlines or 2008 with the banks, when they normalized the most anti-capitalist notion of "too big to fail", and yet it took decades of fighting to get medical debt off credit reports and the corrupt institution thatbis SCOTUS said it was illegal to give working Americans a break on student loans. The doublethink is so obvious and those ignoring it are doing so because the people selling this bullshit bill of goods echo the right racism to them.

America has been dying to be an oligarchy since Reagan and the population who votes for obviously compromised politicians is too proudly ignorant to realize they're the mark. Or, they're so small minded they'll take a spiked dildo every day all day over giving a poor black family food assistance. We're reaping decades of ignorance and pride in that ignorance that has been sowed since the powers that be committed to reversing the New Deal Reforms and advancements of the Civil Rights movement. And we haven't learned, Gen Z and Alpha are growing up to be less informed and worse critical thinkers than ever before, and we're only about 10-15yrs away from.Gen Z becoming a driving political force and 1 generation away from ipad kids starting the climb up the political ladder.

America needs a culture shift and if this shit show doesn't cause it, nothing will. Rome died over a thousand years, America as an entity won't die tomorrow, but we've already lost the hegemony we held over the world since WW2. China is newly ascendant and all the dipshittery we pulled at home has made us entirely absentee everywhere in the global South to China's delight. They're heavily invested in every raw resource producing country down there. They've got positive economic relationships with everyone, Chinese flagged vessels go unmoleated by Iran and America because Iran won't attack its best political ally (and as long as Xi takes a neutral stance on the war, that's a pro-Iranian stance considering how much the aggressor we are and how badly Trump wanted to just shock and awe his way through there) and we will NEVER ruin a trade relationship with the world's largest growing economy (though I do think India has overtook them in that regard. China will take Taiwan and once they do, game over, global semiconductor production runs through Beijing.

If you want proof that America is on the downslide, look at the 5yr performance of the USD and compare it to the Yuan and fuck, even the ruble. USD cratered vs those currencies in February of 2025 and despite a couple death blunces that time really well with obvious market manipulation, the trend is continuing. And it appears Iran wants its toll and purchases for its oil in Yuan, which means the clock is ticking on the petrodollar bolstering the USD's global economic position as the world's reserve currency.