Is it possible that these companies feel they have more to lose by missing out on AI than by taking on debt? Or that they genuinely are in a race to superintelligence, which easily justifies this debt and far more?
When I worked at Apple, I remember seeing the commentariat insisting that <project> was bound to fail, that we didn't know what we were doing. When in fact extremely competent people knew precisely what they were doing. Of course, the commentariat were wrong and I'd wager most of them use what I had a part in building. The same story tended to repeat across my subsequent jobs in big tech. All this seems quite similar to me.
Even if AI completely busts and all of these servers are worthless that doesn't mean the data centers are. There's still a need for data centers to host non-AI servers. The hyperscalers will close/sell other data centers and serve from places where they have long term commitments at.
3.2 trillion sounds like a lot until you spread it over 20 years and half a dozen trillion+ dollar companies. It's hard to tell how much a bag they're holding but it's almost certainly negligible compared to revenue and market cap. The only real systemic risk is the risk of for some reason not needing any data centers.
If some lenders go bankrupt on a datacenter note post-buildout and the capital structure is reworked, lowering the costs by removing capitalization costs from the cashflow of the inference provider, that is all to the good of people who did not do the initial lending.
I think that is extremely unlikely, but it's good for datacenter doomers to think through these scenarios IMO.
I am not sure whether the dot-com boom was a net-positive, and the AI boom may be less productive.
If you’re a retireer yeah you just want a steady dividend (or buyback).
But i mean for a 401k that won’t be spent from for 20+ years you absolutely want business to be investing into themselves. Otherwise go buy gold.
But current era also has echoes of capex financing (eg cisco lending to its buyers) and Enron (eg use of SPVs).
I don’t think that most people who are concerned about a bubble think people and orgs fueling it are stupid, but they’re operating with local incentive structures that can result is systematic problems.
And for folks who have lived through multiple of these (and maybe lost paper wealth, retirement savings, or homes), I think being concerned is reasonable.
Hard won lessons and all that.
It’s just some nameless regular guy crunching some numbers and feeding to another regular guy who interprets the numbers. And so on
Capital waste is only capital waste if the physical goods that were built are no longer useful for anyone. Otherwise, it's only a waste for the people who lent money.
ggm•1h ago
This is a significant proportion of the market. Having this amount of money not understood is harmful.
Grombobulous•1h ago
Is this money not understood by the tech giants taking on the debt? I imagine they understand exactly what’s going on.
I think the way they see it is that it’s riskier for them to miss out on timing this investment.
The other question is “where else should they put their money?” Tech giants before the AI boom made a heck of a lot of cash that they had nothing they could do with it. Remember before AI when the existential crisis was stock buybacks? That was a bunch of companies who had so much profit that all they could think to do with it was buy their own stock back.
I am sure there will be a bubble pop, correction, general downturn, or something like that, but the question remains how much it’s actually going to matter. If AI blows up in Microsoft or Google’s face they’re just going to write it off and spend a decade paying zero income tax, or whatever other clever corporate accounting gets them out of that pickle.
angry_impala•1h ago
csense•58m ago
If you or your retirement is a shareholder in one of these companies, you'd rather they return $100 billion to you with boring buybacks or dividends than put it in an exciting AI investment that returns $1-$10 billion. Even though it didn't end up completely worthless, it's still a bad investment.
> If AI blows up in Microsoft or Google’s face they’re just going to write it off and spend a decade paying zero income tax
As a shareholder, you'd also rather they return $100 billion to you than put it in a bad investment that returns $0 -- even if that bad investment lets them write off $20 billion in taxes over the next 10 years you'd still be $80 billion better off.
> how much it’s actually going to matter. If AI blows up in Microsoft or Google’s face
An AI winter shouldn't be an existential threat to these companies -- but "the share price is 10% - 20% lower than the counterfactual where they didn't make these questionable investments" still represents a lot of lost wealth for shareholders -- billions (or trillions for the industry as a whole). A lot of that wealth is the hands of ordinary people, often through retirement investments in index funds.
Grombobulous•38m ago
E.g., if Google doesn’t invest in AI then AI will kill their search engine business. A lot of us don’t love the Google search AI Overview but now they’re competing directly with ChatGPT, and they’re essentially not a search monopoly anymore.
One way to look at a bust AI investment is the destroyed value of the stock like you mentioned, but perhaps that’s somewhat hindsight-biased? Perhaps the reality for some companies is that if they sit on their hands and do nothing they lose 40% of their company value and if they spend a ton of money on AI they lose 20% of their company value. Of course we don’t know the outcome yet.