OpenAI's Phantom Deals Are Collapsing Faster Than Anyone Predicted — Including the People Who Predicted It

A Bluesky post went modestly viral this week with the kind of confidence that only reads well in retrospect. The author, recapping a recent podcast conversation, wrote that {{entity:openai|OpenAI}} had "not committed to any deals" and that the whole edifice would "ultimately be revealed and collapse." Then, with visible satisfaction, they added: "I didn't think it would materialize less than 3 days later." The post got 480 likes — not enormous by platform standards, but enough to travel — and the replies treated it less like analysis than like receipts. The claim being validated wasn't abstract. RAM prices, according to posts circulating alongside it, had started dropping because OpenAI couldn't follow through on what amounted to a promise to purchase 40% of the world's supply. One post put it with blunt economy: "AI is about to die. How loud are you cheering?" That framing — the cheer, the vindication — tells you something about who has been watching {{beat:ai-industry-business|AI industry}} deal-making most closely. These aren't confused outsiders. They're people who've been following the supply chain and the partnership announcements long enough to notice when the commitments fail to materialize. The mood on Bluesky this week wasn't surprise. It was the particular satisfaction of having been right about something that everyone else insisted was fine. What makes this a story isn't just the RAM market blip. It's that {{story:openai-losing-products-partnerships-benefit-doubt-2af4|OpenAI has now lost products, partnerships, and capital commitments in the same short window}} — {{entity:sora|Sora}} shuttered, the {{entity:disney|Disney}} deal collapsed, and now the supply-chain promises are unwinding — and each individual collapse has been explained away as a strategic pivot or a timing issue. But on Bluesky, the community has stopped accepting those explanations one at a time and started reading them as a pattern. The podcast commentator who posted the 480-like prediction wasn't making a bold call. They were narrating something a significant slice of the platform had already concluded. The question isn't whether {{entity:sam-altman|Sam Altman}} can explain any single deal falling through. He probably can. The question is whether the explanation still lands when the deals keep falling through in sequence. {{story:openais-phantom-deals-collapsing-faster-anyone-6fb1|The answer, at least on Bluesky, is no}} — and the RAM market happened to provide the most legible evidence yet of what over-promised AI infrastructure ambitions actually look like when they meet procurement reality. The people cheering aren't cheering for AI to fail. They're cheering because they were told the commitments were real.