The actual risk is not that OpenAI collapses, but that they become one of five players in a highly competitive market.
They will face margin compression and declining market share, which reduces a 30x+ price to sales ratio down to 5x, which means the market cap slows or maybe even stays flat
Flat market cap means it’s impossible to make the $1.4t commitments as quickly as planned
The core issue DeSantis is pointing at is legitimate and worth taking seriously. OpenAI is unprofitable, has never turned a profit, and yet it's been structured into the infrastructure of major tech companies in ways that make it systematically important.
Microsoft is betting its entire AI narrative on OpenAI. Oracle signed a 300 billion dollar contract over five years for infrastructure. Nvidia committed 100 billion dollars. If OpenAI collapses, Oracle's cash flow gets obliterated. Microsoft's valuation story falls apart. Nvidia loses their biggest customer in this new compute paradigm. So what happens if OpenAI fails? These companies have to save it because they can't afford not to.
The uncomfortable truth is that we've created a situation where one unprofitable company has become so central to the financial markets that its failure would be contagious across the entire tech sector. This is the same pattern we saw with financial institutions in 2008 just playing out with AI infrastructure instead of mortgage derivatives.
If OpenAI actually implodes, you don't just get one company going under. You get cascading doubts about whether these massive infrastructure bets made sense at all. Oracle, Nvidia, Microsoft, SoftBank, all of them suddenly need to explain why they committed hundreds of billions to something that failed. The market reprices not just OpenAI but the entire AI thesis. That's bad.
The realistic outcome isn't really a hard failure anyway. It's that if OpenAI ever gets genuinely close to the edge, some combination of government backing, private consortium rescue, or emergency capital injection happens. Not because it's good policy but because the system can't afford the alternative. Let's hope for the sake of our economy this day never comes!