D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria dropped a striking number on The Real Eisman Playbook: “The cumulative run rate of OpenAI and Anthropic right now is clearly above $75 billion.” He then revised upward in real time: “By the time you include Gemini’s revenue and maybe a little bit Meta and xAI, we’re above $100 billion of revenue from what was zero a couple of years ago.” Host Steve Eisman’s reaction captured the moment: “In revenue?”
That is the bull case in one sentence. The bear case, according to Luria, is buried inside it. Building a business directly on top of a closed model is a structural trap. “If you build your business on top of a model from either Anthropic or OpenAI and something happens to that model, you’re screwed,” he warned, pointing to a government intervention that reined in Anthropic’s Fable model: “If you were a business that built your business directly on top of a fable model, you’re out of business.”
The Picks-and-Shovels Trade Is Working
The revenue is real, and the infrastructure layer is capturing most of it. NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) posted Q1 FY2027 revenue of $81.615 billion, with Data Center alone at $75.246 billion and networking up 199% year over year. Jensen Huang framed the moment as “the largest infrastructure expansion in human history.” Supply commitments now sit at $119.0 billion, and Q2 guidance points to $91.0 billion. See the Q1 FY27 8-K for the underlying disclosures.
Trading around $196.75 with a forward P/E of 23, NVIDIA has quietly become the most reasonably valued mega-cap AI trade. It is up 13.41% over the past year even as the SaaS layer wobbles.
The Hyperscaler CapEx Wall
Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) posted Q2 revenue of $119.8 billion, with Cloud growth accelerating to 82% and backlog reaching $514 billion. Full-year 2026 CapEx guidance was raised to $195 billion to $205 billion. Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) spent $37.5 billion in a single quarter and pushed Microsoft 365 Copilot to 15 million paid seats, up over 160% year over year. Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) raised 2026 CapEx guidance to $125-145 billion.
The market is not rewarding scale evenly. Microsoft is down 19.19% year to date on capex ROI concerns, even after AI business revenue crossed a $37 billion annual run rate. On Reddit, one viral post captured retail’s mood: “Azure +39%, AI revenue +123%, 4th st. beat, stock down 30%. The market has decided capex is sin.”
Where the SaaS Trap Bites
Luria’s warning lands hardest on companies wrapping closed models. He echoed a point Palantir (NASDAQ:PLTR) CEO Alex Karp has raised for months: “If you put your data into Anthropic’s model, they have your data. Then they know how your business operates. And if they decide to compete with you, they can compete with you.”
Palantir is the counterexample. It owns its ontology layer, sits above the model providers, and posted Q1 FY2026 U.S. commercial revenue growth of 133%. Yet at a trailing P/E of 148 and price-to-sales of 60.36, valuation has done the work of a warning shot. The stock is down 26% year to date. Polymarket traders assigned a 98% probability of PLTR closing lower today.
What to Watch Next
Luria’s framework points to a clean bifurcation. The infrastructure layer, led by NVIDIA and the sovereign-AI push from players deploying models like NVIDIA’s Nemotron, is compounding hard cash. The application layer built on closed foundation models faces platform risk, regulatory risk, and data-leak-to-competitor risk. Prediction markets already see it: NVDA carries 94.5% to 99.5% probability of holding above $180 through month-end. PLTR sits in a narrow $108 to $144 band with fading conviction beyond August.
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