Every AI valuation written this year contains the same implicit promise. Tech industry revenue will roughly double by 2030.

Two trillion dollars of new revenue, give or take, in less than four years.

Nobody seems keen to ask the obvious follow-up. Other industries do not have that money sitting in a drawer waiting to be wired over. It has to come out of marketing, payroll, legal, insurance, every budget currently funding something else. The valuations are not a forecast of growth.

They are a forecast of someone else's contraction, scheduled but not yet announced.