In September 2023, Sequoia's @DavidCahn6 wrote AI's $200B Question: sequoiacap.com/article/follo…
In June 2024, he followed it up with AI's $600B Question: sequoiacap.com/article/ais-6…
It is now June 2026, and these questions -- about implied revenue growth in the AI ecosystem -- still basically remain unresolved.
If you plug in updated earnings/capex numbers from Amazon, Nvidia, etc., then an updated version for today would be AI's ~$1.5T question.
There are credible theses for resolving these questions in the future -- the overbuild will be met by $200B, then $600B, then trillions of dollars of future revenue.
Today, OpenAI + Anthropic + Startups gives you about ~$80B ARR. The speed at which this is growing, and the difference between this and the overbuild figures, tell you something about the confidence of the investors, both in terms of magnitude and timing. And it also tells you something about how quickly the frontier labs need to keep growing revenue in order to satisfy the assumptions that underlie the overbuild-driven public market valuations.