Steve Eisman (of The Big Short) is raising the warning sign on AI. OpenAI and Anthropic have committed to hundreds of billions of spending at the hyperscalers (Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc), but where does the money come from? In this interview Steve reveals all.
Steve's channel: / @realeismanplaybook
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What Steve Eisman said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Steve Eisman argues the AI industry faces a massive concentration risk: 70% of hyperscaler AI revenue (25-30% of total cloud revenue) comes from just Anthropic and OpenAI, and 50% of Oracle's RPO backlog is from OpenAI. He says OpenAI is the weaker entity, with $6.5 billion Q2 revenue but $12 billion costs, while Anthropic grew revenue over 100% in three months. Eisman believes LLMs have no moats, citing token maxing ending and Chinese open-weight models like Kimi K3 taking share. He calls the 'AI ends the world' narrative a subterfuge to trigger regulation that would create a duopoly moat. He recommends 'picks and shovels' plays like Nvidia, Micron, GE Vernova, Arista, Cisco, and Eaton over LLMs or hyperscalers, which have lost cash flow. He dismisses Michael Burry's depreciation argument as too academic, and sees 5% on the 10-year Treasury as the market's Rubicon.
Key takeaways
70% of hyperscaler AI revenue, 25-30% of total cloud revenue, comes solely from Anthropic and OpenAI, a massive concentration risk.
OpenAI is the weaker entity: $6.5B Q2 revenue, $12B costs, revenue up 18% in three months vs Anthropic's over 100%.
LLMs have no moats; token maxing has ended and Chinese open-weight models like Kimi K3 are taking market share.
Prefers picks and shovels (Nvidia, Micron, GE Vernova, Arista, Cisco, Eaton) over LLMs or hyperscalers.
5% on the 10-year Treasury is the market's Rubicon; above that, expect a correction.
Numbers and commitments
Figure
What it refers to
Type
At
70%
of Nvidia's accounts receivable from five customers
The host of The Real Eisman Playbook podcast. I don't know about you, but I know that I don't have a hundred billion dollars to spend on building data centers. You may know our next guest from The Big Short.
Your character. You had to work that in there, didn't you? I did have to. Do you like being described that way? I think it's going to be on my tombstone. The whole United States of America would go into a recession overnight. Oh, yikes. Okay. Mr. Anders. Well, I'd have said you're out of your mind. Yeah, you're insane. To get my programming to impersonate a DT. This industry, despite all the hundreds of billions of dollars that's been spent on it, has...
Joining us right now is Steve Eisman. Let's bring in Steve Eisman. Steve, welcome back. You are known for spotting a bubble before anyone else does. Michael Lewis wrote a whole book on it. So, my first question to you is, where on earth are we in AI right now?
There was a great movie with Sean Connery where he played this — I can't remember the name — Finding Forrester. And I remember the young character asks him a very complicated question and his response is, as he's eating soup, he goes, 'It's not exactly a soup question. It's a complicated question.' I never forgot that line. I thought it was one of the best lines in the history of movies. It's not a soup question.
This is how I look at it. The concentration risks here are all inspiring, you know. So, you take a step back and you — and someone said to me, why don't you analyze this software company? Forget about what it does. It's a software company, an established software company. And if it turned out that the company had thousands of customers, that would be great. If it turned out the company only had two customers, you'd say, 'I don't want to invest in that because if something bad happens to one of those customers, this company is dead.' There's something of that going on in the whole AI story. So, let's start just with Nvidia. So, Nvidia, God bless them, and I own the stock, okay? When they reported a few weeks ago, I think the revenue growth was like — it was like 110%.
So, so let's just — let's just take a step back just for a second and say to ourselves, wait a minute. The largest company on planet Earth just had — forget about earnings growth, which was great too — just revenue growth of over 100%. Like, that's insane. So, that would say the AI story is great until you read the 10-Q, which came out that night. And I'm going to impress your viewers by saying if they look at it and they go to Note 7.
Eisman, S. (2026, October 2). Steve Eisman's Brutally Honest Thoughts on the AI Bubble. [Interview transcript]. New Money. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2970497/
MLA
Steve Eisman. "Steve Eisman's Brutally Honest Thoughts on the AI Bubble.." New Money, 2 Oct. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2970497/.
BibTeX
@misc{eisman2026_2970497,
author = {Steve Eisman},
title = {Steve Eisman's Brutally Honest Thoughts on the AI Bubble.},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, New Money. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {oct},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2970497/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
