Six Days Before Nvidia Reports, a Billionaire Says AI Adds ‘Literally Zero’

Quick Read

• Palihapitiya says AI drives zero Global 2000 earnings growth, yet MSFT’s AI business hit a $37 billion annual run rate, up 123%.

• MSFT’s annual capex doubled to $116 billion while free cash flow dropped 23%, leaving markets to judge whether tokens become durable earnings.

• NVDA’s August 26 report tests Palihapitiya’s ‘literally zero’ claim against MSFT’s $678 billion in signed commercial commitments.

• Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and Microsoft didn’t make the cut. Grab the names FREE today.

On August 20,Microsoft’s startups blog published “Resolution, not deflection: how Maven uses AI agents to transform the enterprise customer journey”, another marquee enterprise AI customer story from the world’s largest seller of AI capacity. Hours later, billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya posted that for the Global 2000, “Their earnings growth has literally zero to do with AI or anything remotely close”. That same morning he asked, “Yet, high value tasks don’t seem to be increasing…so where are all these tokens going??”

The split screen matters because Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is the cleanest scoreboard for whether enterprise AI is monetizing. The scoreboard is mixed. Shares closed at $481.15 on August 20, up just 0.12% year to date, down 3.91% over one year, but up 21.2% in the last month after a record fiscal year.