Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding

https://asia.nikkei.com/business/technology/five-us-tech-giants-hidden-debts-soar-to-1.65tn-on-opaque-ai-funding

by NordStreamYacht • 2 days ago

364 247 2 days ago

asia.nikkei.com

https://archive.ph/20260720174223/https://asia.nikkei.com/bu...

mNovak2• 2 days ago

Archive link:

https://archive.ph/20260720174223/https://asia.nikkei.com/bu...

bmenrigh2• 2 days ago

I'm in the US and I'm either getting NXDOMAIN or NOERROR (with no A record answer) back from every big nameserver I try (my ISP, Google, Cloudflare, etc.).

But a dig +trace archive.ph (which recurses all the way to the root locally) resolves it fine.

Is there some US-mandated DNS filtering I don't know about?

Shank• 2 days ago

Hmm, does DoH work?

arcfour• 1 day ago

No, the archive.today (and .ph, .is, etc.) operator configured their nameservers to return invalid responses to Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 resolvers because Cloudflare doesn't forward EDNS client subnet info (for the privacy of their users). The operator claims to need this information for load-balancing but I don't buy that argument.

As far as I was aware, their issue was resolved, but sometimes I still see failures so I don't really know.

Also, "US-mandated DNS filtering" would be a violation of the 1A except in narrow circumstances (which don't exist here) so I'm not sure that that should be your first thought...

darth_avocado3• 2 days ago

Well technically they don’t own the debt, the SPVs that own the data centers do. The giants just have long term commitments, but if shit hits the fan, it’s not the tech giants but the banks that lent the money to the SPVs that are at risk. This usually means all of us are on the hook.

AznHisoka• 2 days ago

As someone who belongs to “all of us”, i vote to not bail us out if shit hits the fan. No need to ask me when it happens, OK? No really, it’s nice of you but we really dont need to be bailed out. You are welcome :)

spaceman_20204• 2 days ago

Replace you with AI, and when the AI math falls apart, use your tax money to bail out AI

And they’ll get away with it too

laughing_man9• 2 days ago

The problem is if large banks fail they take everyone else with them. We should have dealt with this in 2009, but for some reason it didn't happen.

But money talks, I guess.

superze• 2 days ago

Always remember kids. Socialism is bad, it's only good if we bail out banks with billions. While you lose your house, and your job, they get bonuses.

joe_the_user• 2 days ago

Unfortunately, the votes for a regime of permanent bailouts were already in when Ben Barnacke made his famous speech proposing helicopters over cities if deflation reached a crisis level (though the Internet says Milton Friedman thought of this first). Some later observed "the helicopters only seem to go to Wall Street", which isn't surprising.

dev_l1x_be• 2 days ago

Is there a party that supports no bail?

DrScientist5• 2 days ago

Money isn't lost per se, it's transferred.

ie for every loser there is a winner.

Obvious ones are those who can extract value from this companies now ( high salaries/bonus etc ), swapping worthless paper for real assets, Nvidia and their share holders etc. Investors who hold short positions etc.

xtiansimon2• 1 day ago

“As someone who belongs to “all of us”, i vote to not bail us out if shit hits the fan.”

You have alighted onto an interesting topic: “bail out”. I believe a closely related word on the semiotic chain is “retreat”.

I don’t feel that our culture would wish to “retreat” from AI. I know quite a few managers and programmers who absolutely delight in the fruits of the industry.

No doubt the titans of the AI industry, who stand to lose their shirts, would also like a bailout. As would the workers under their leadership. Finally, if the governments of the world are taking “AI” technologies as seriously as I think they are, then I should expect a bailout in the event of bubble go boom is inevitable.

In which case, Buy Low; Sell High.

SanjayMehta• 2 days ago

"U.S. energy company Enron, though fundamentally different from tech giants, collapsed in 2001 due to off-balance-sheet debt hidden behind multiple shell companies. Even with proper accounting practices, an increase in joint ventures with low transparency could raise concerns in the market."

Remember the vendor financing model which got a lot of technology companies into trouble at the same time? It took some years, almost all those companies disappeared. Motorola, Nortel, Lucent ...

fuzzfactor• 6 hours ago

If it's not done exactly like Enron it's not that kind of crime is it?

walrus016• 2 days ago

If I owe the bank $750,000 and can't pay, it's my problem.

If I owe the bank $1,750,000,000 and can't pay, it's the bank's problem.

killingtime74• 2 days ago

If the bank is owed $1,650,000,000,000 and isn't paid, then it becomes the tax payers problem apparently

mattoxic• 2 days ago

As Australian failed rich guy /scumbag Alan Bond said... if you owe 30k you have problems, if you owe them 30 million they take you to lunch. Or words to that effect

Aurornis• 2 days ago

If you are a collection of 5 companies with annual net income in the hundreds of billions of dollars, the debt is actually still their problem.

Everyone likes to repeat this tired cliche but skips all of the steps that would have to happen to get to that point.

laughing_man9• 2 days ago

I don't know. The guy I bought my house from owed the bank $400k. He didn't make any payments for two years, and then they paid him $20k to go away.

VirusNewbie• 2 days ago

how are these long term commitments structured? Can the big companies default on them? pay a small penalty? I think that probably makes a large difference.

protocolture• 2 days ago

SPVs that own the data centers

I mean if AI falls short we might see a collapse in the price of colo but those investments would probably just be paid back over 10x the period.

harry84• 2 days ago

Well technically they don’t own the debt

Channelling the 1980s for off-balance sheet financing 101.

From an economic perspective there is zero difference between borrowing to buy an asset and entering into a non-cancellable long term (equivalent to its economic life) lease for the asset.

The first option causes an asset and a liability on the balance sheet, affecting debt ratios that appear in financing contracts and so on. The second does not appear on the balance sheet.

You pay every month, like it or not. You call it interest or you call it a lease payment. You need it off balance sheet for reasons, investment bankers will structure that to make it happen for a fee.

Technically, from an economic perspective, it's debt.

throwup2382• 2 days ago

Technically, from an economic perspective, it's debt.

Isn’t the important difference that it doesn’t trigger bankruptcy on default? Economically it might not be that different but it has some significance legally because the courts have some fast tracks that trigger bankruptcies (IANAL but that’s my layman’s understanding).

If they “default” in this case it will lead to lawsuits that they will almost certainly lose but in the mean time they kick the can down the road hoping to recover on general economic headwinds like lower interest rates. IMO the risks are obviously correlated here but I’m betting short term incentives drove this mess.

vasco2• 2 days ago

This is not true at all, leases appear on balance sheets. It's not the 80s anymore

See Apple's FY2025 10-K, the leases are in page 42 under "Lease-Related Assets and Liabilities", which shows:

Operating leases

- Other current liabilities: $1,579 million

- Other non-current liabilities: $10,911 million

Finance leases

- Other current liabilities: $538 million

- Other non-current liabilities: $692 million

Total lease liabilities: $13,720 million

https://s2.q4cdn.com/470004039/files/doc_financials/2025/ar/...

blitzar5• 2 days ago

tbh this is only novel for the tech companies because they have never really had these types of product lines or unit cost structures before. a sass and brick and motor retailer scale very differently.

blks• 2 days ago

Capitalists love to socialize losses

hinata08• 2 days ago

*costs

Privatize revenues, socialize costs of business

You're not "competitive" if you have to pay for workers, ink or investments. Workers only get a wage because of communist populists who don't understand business, and (insert place - even the Philippines these days) has the most highest taxes and wages around the world.

blitzar5• 2 days ago

Heads I win, tails you lose.

0xbadcafebee• 2 days ago

it’s not the tech giants but the banks that lent the money to the SPVs that are at risk

Banks have not been loaning AI money for some time. They hit all their regulatory safeguard limits so they can't keep loaning. Half the money being invested in AI is private capital. There is still systemic risk, because private capital is a shadow banking system and you don't know who will be affected when they go kaput. Your utility company may [read: will] go bankrupt, but the money in your personal bank account is safe. Your retirement account, however...

darth_avocado3• 1 day ago

Private capital isn’t some dark box, at least half of it is pension funds, endowment funds, insurance companies and non profits. Then there are private credit arms of banks, sovereign wealth funds and family offices of wealthy individuals.

fancyfredbot2• 2 days ago

s/banks/private credit/

shelled• 2 days ago

This usually means all of us are on the hook.

And since we are talking about USD (specifically "of" USA), it also means globally a hell lot more of "all of us" are on the hook than we would have been involved (even remotely) had (or would) this endeavour ever ended up in some sort of general success.

I don't know whether it'd be "tails I win, heads you lose" or "I reap the profits alone, you reap the losses alone". Maybe the latter and it becomes magnitudes more interesting when it expands (or rather engulfs) beyond the boundaries of the great nation.

m1013• 2 days ago

The banks aren’t lending the money to these SPVs. It’s mostly private credit.

The way banks get involved is that they may be lending senior financing to the private credit funds but that means they have a ton of subordination.

ItsBob6• 2 days ago

It’s mostly private credit

I believe that some of the private credit is the banks' own private credit arm! It's absolutely mental: the bank can't lend to them so they have a private credit company/division that can skirt around the rules and still provide the capital!

Also, I bet that the Oracle datacenters aren't for Oracle LLC but Oracle Datacenter No 4 LLC so that if it all goes tits up, Oracle LLC walks away!

sajithdilshan• 2 days ago

But how could it be that the banks have lent the money without a leverage or proper risk assessment? Also what I don't understand is that how come the banks cannot claw back the money they lent if they found out corruption or any other ill intention by the borrowers.

lemax• 2 days ago

These are relatively contained private credit markets though. We’re not looking at anything 2009 level. For scale, total US mortgage debt peaked at $9.3T ahead of the subprime mortgage crisis, 73% of GDP at the time. We’re talking here about ~5% of GDP.

porridgeraisin• 1 day ago

This is the most relevant comment in this thread.

StanislavPetrov• 1 day ago

We were around ~$11 trillion in debt in 2009. Now we are ~$40 trillion in debt. The FED balance sheet was less than $1 trillion before the crisis in 2008, now it is around ~$7 trillion. Our debt to GDP ratio was ~64% in 2008 and is now at ~120%. Put simply, our ability to absorb any sort of financial shock by taking on massive amounts of (more) debt (which is what we did in 2008) is not remotely similar to what it was during the last crisis. This would be true even if we weren't in the midst of a highly inflationary environment due largely, but not solely, to the ongoing energy crisis being worsened by the wars in Iran and Ukraine.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S

surgical_fire3• 1 day ago

That is not accurate according to the article:

By investing in the data center's operating company with a 20% stake and using the facility under a lease agreement, Meta secured computing resources but also increased its hidden debt.
Meta has a contract guaranteeing investors' losses if the data center becomes unnecessary and the lease is terminated.

The way they are hiding these debts is by having a stake in a data center company. But if shit goes tits up they are contractually liable for 100% of the losses.

It's not the fund that lent the money to the SPV, it is Meta who is offering guarantees here.

nradov• 1 day ago

We're not on the hook. The systemically important banks are very well capitalized now and have limited exposure to these debts. Even if there are substantial defaults the big banks will be fine.

mNovak2• 2 days ago

On the one hand, these debts may be off the balance sheet, but institutional investors certainly know about them and can reason about the company's valuation. Retail investors may be caught out slightly more.

But on the other hand, these companies are essentially paying for the service of taking the debt off books (by paying the leasing premium to the SPV partners). I guess I'm wondering what they really gain from doing so, if again sophisticated investors can see through the games?

wwind123• 2 days ago

I think it's just a common practice to do it this way in the industry. May not mean these companies are intentionally hiding something at this point of time.

miohtama• 2 days ago

It's mostly for having lower debt-to-equity and higher equity multiplier (better stock price). And you retain your credit rating and can get cheaper debt.

But of course it is obvious in this scale. However, credit ratings do not care, as they are driven by regulation, and regulators get their paycheck regardless.

Also in the joint venture like Blueowl/Meta for the $27B Hyperion data center in the case when things go wrong Meta is in theory bankrupt remote. So in theory it should not affect credit rating because when the bad debt is not served, Blueowl, not Meta, is in the hook for it. And Meta's investors should be protected for this event.

dvh• 2 days ago

To quote the Big short: "I have five houses and a condo."

King-Aaron4• 2 days ago

These debts mean nothing if the US government actually views AI technology as being on par with the Manhattan project. They'll just bail them out or nationalise them.

oblio• 2 days ago

They can only do that if AI is profitable or at break even. Otherwise they would need to finance these companies yearly.

dandanua• 2 days ago

In other words, the US gov will simply put all the debt onto the public, as usual.

tchalla2• 2 days ago

The advantages of being a reserve currency and then also blaming your peer competitors as “manipulators”.

elictronic• 2 days ago

China is a currency manipulator who steals patents and ideas from other countries. The US uses the reserve currency as it's most beneficial soft power. The Petrodollar is the clearest example of this by a large margin.

Both are true.

richardw• 2 days ago

If the US companies need trillions to barely beat Chinese companies spending billions, despite a multi year head start...

rmunn9• 2 days ago

That's the difference between innovating and copying/distilling someone else's innovation. https://wccftech.com/chinas-kimi-k3-identifies-itself-as-ant...

WoodenChair• 2 days ago

These debts mean nothing if the US government actually views AI technology as being on par with the Manhattan project. They'll just bail them out or nationalise them.

According to Wikipedia, the Manhattan project only cost $28 billion in 2024 dollars. That's a completely different order of magnitude compared to what we're talking about here. I imagine the size of the investment here would even be hard for the US government to swallow.

3form• 2 days ago

What percentage of the budget was it? I think that's also needed for a meaningful comparison. I've heard about the war taxes being high, but I don't know anything about the economy of the time otherwise.

walrus016• 2 days ago

Or, whole program development and per unit costs included, about the equivalent of 14 units of B-2 bombers in 2024 dollars.

King-Aaron4• 2 days ago

I just made a similar comment further down the chain here, but I frankly think the dollars and cents economics around AI is a moot point. Like the pentagon, they'll just pull money out of thin air, or from other departments, or just write things off like it never existed.

I don't actually think the current administration, or the people behind it, actually care about real world economics anymore.

dartharva2• 2 days ago

They'll bail them out with what money? US is already almost $40T in debt, how do you think the bond market would react if another $2T were abruptly added to it?

tmp10423288442• 2 days ago

Seemed fine with adding that much during Covid

King-Aaron4• 2 days ago

Look at how the pentagon is funded. Trillions get poured in with zero accountability, dark projects that never get disclosed at all, and audits that never pass.

When it comes to military level stuff, it seems to exist outside of normal financial logic. They just invent money for it.

laughing_man9• 2 days ago

Here's the thing about debt, though: If your debt is denominated in your own sovereign currency, you can just print more when you run out of money.

hdgvhicv3• 2 days ago

Just have to suck it up. Otherwise they won’t see that 40t.

bakies• 1 day ago

... Nothing happens? They're not correlated at all. We've added 35T since 2000 and yield were all over and we're at the same spot as then

laughing_man9• 2 days ago

If they bail them out it should be done like the GM bailout. Shareholders leave with nothing.

anonymousiam• 1 day ago

And all salaried retirees lost their pensions and medical coverage, while the hourly ones kept everything. Thanks Obama!

andrewstuart• 2 days ago

Pretty sure Tim Apple can flip open his wallet and pick up the tab for everyone, if he’s feeling generous.

roschdal• 2 days ago

Imagine shorting Alphabet stock now , just before the AI bubble bursts, what an opportunity of a lifetime.

hnarn• 2 days ago

Go ahead.

Terr_2• 2 days ago

Good luck timing it. "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

There isn't always a mechanism that will translate being-right about some fundamental fact into making-money from it.

P.S. It isn't trivially "solved" by someone setting up a gambling scheme either. Many people who are right will still lose because they didn't also guess when other people would start to agree with the conclusion. Plus there's the time-value of money for things which take longer to play out.

glimshe• 1 day ago

Shorting is a very different thing from buying a stock and living through a drawdown. You can bleed money fast and if you don't have options protecting your trade, your loss potential is unlimited. Once you pay for the insurance through options, the profits aren't that attractive unless you can see the future and predict exactly when the stocks will go down.

ndsipa_pomu5• 1 day ago

Isn't Oracle more likely to collapse first? However, timing these things is next to impossible, so good luck if you attempt shorting them.

ur-whale• 2 days ago

https://archive.ph/lOlv5

ItsBob6• 2 days ago

It's hard not to be fatalistic about all of this now: In my mind, it's crystal clear that the investments will never be paid back. The revenue streams from all the companies involved don't add up. It must fail at this point.

That means losses. Big losses for some.

I assume that these off-the-books companies can quite literally be pinched off and the debt becomes the banks' problem, so the primary company, i.e. Meta, Oracle, can walk away but the banks will be left holding the bag.

We know what happened the last time the banks played their stupid games!

walrus016• 2 days ago

For anyone old enough to remember attending bankruptcy/liquidation auctions of "dotcom 1.0" companies in 2000, 2001 or so and buying an Aeron chair, or similar, I really wonder what it will look like this time around. There was one point in time where only very slightly used datacenter cooling systems and diesel backup generators were selling for pennies on the dollar.

ItsBob6• 2 days ago

You'll be able to buy used H100s. One careful owner. Never overclocked etc.

They'll be knackered though, unlike a good Herman Miller chair. :-)

We might even be able to afford RAM again!

Gareth3214• 2 days ago

IMHO I think the blast radius is implicitly contained. The major investments are in data centres, and the current investment cases impute near zero residual value after five years. Meaning that current valuations already assume "catastrophic" declines in equipment valuation. This is unusually clear-eyed and sober investment calculus in the tech space.

Further, unlike during the dotcom crisis, most of this spending is not driven by debt. It's mostly funded by the large companies which are producing enormous revenue and profit to pay for this. It's an order of magnitude different.

The major question mark on these valuations is the revenue assumptions, which can be reasonably criticised. A bear case here is that revenue growth is not as aggressive as projected, and valuations steadily decline over time. I don't see a likely scenario where the entire sector collapses. There is no apparent cascade failure mechanism. Of course, these mechanisms aren't always immediately clear prior to crashes.

We must remember that all of the models coming out of China are presumed to be distilled frontier models. Meaning a) they will always be x days/weeks/months behind the frontier models, b) they will never be quite as good, c) inference will generally be constrained by compute capacity (especially as the frontier studios have an incentive to capitalise on their moat), meaning Chinese studios will always be at a disadvantage.

The real wildcard here is self-improvements. It looks like we're already in the singularity, meaning a large proportion of LLM development is already done by LLMs. The development cycle on these might be months now, but it will be weeks soon. Days within a year, then hours, minutes, seconds, and milliseconds. It's impossible to predict what this curve looks like.

m1013• 2 days ago

The banks aren’t the ones on the hook here. Private credit funds are.

axegon_2• 2 days ago

And every time some points all of this out, they are "denier", "left behind" and all the other everything-ai fanatics can come up with. As for the imminent crash - I'm all for it. There's a whole generation that is incapable of thinking for themselves without an LLM telling them what to do or worse still - do it for them. And for much of the tech world, that is becoming the single point of failure.

As for China - I think their motivation is clear: if they could have pulled it off from the start, their business model would have been the same as MANGO's. Llamacpp opened up the floodgates and their best bet now is to use this and their resources to start pulling the rug from underneath MANGO. I'm not a fan of the "enemy of my enemy" philosophy - they can both be enemies but wile they are at each-other's throats (albeit not openly), I'll gladly sit back and grab some pop-corn.

archagon• 2 days ago

Maybe the "left behind" rhetoric stems from the underlying anxiety of this whole thing imploding and taking the economy with it.

JeremyNT• 1 day ago

And every time some points all of this out, they are "denier", "left behind" and all the other everything-ai fanatics can come up with. As for the imminent crash - I'm all for it. There's a whole generation that is incapable of thinking for themselves without an LLM telling them what to do or worse still - do it for them. And for much of the tech world, that is becoming the single point of failure.

I feel like you can still be an AI maximalist while thinking the numbers simply don't add up.

The problem as I see it is that this is a zero sum game. Nobody has a moat. Even if AI eats all white collar work, where's the profit for these entities? They become commodities and they will compete with each other (and open weight models) only on price, not to mention the workers who lose their jobs to this stuff aren't going to be contributing to the economy at all.

m1013• 2 days ago

The banks are not the ones on the hook here - they no longer lend in a meaningful way as first loss lender on many things. If they lend they do so as a senior financing provider to vehicles that provide the financing.

The actual lending is done by private credit institutions that have raised money, sometimes on the order of 10s of billions of $.

gilfyole• 2 days ago

A bubble in progress waiting for right time (hello 2028) to burst.

4ggr0• 2 days ago

why do you consider 2028 to be the right time for a pop?

dofm3• 2 days ago

I personally think it could pop before then if there is not concerted effort to stop inflating it and maybe start to let the air out.

But the main reason 2028 would be a risky year is the systemic risks around Trump. If he makes even more efforts to put his thumb on the electoral scales than he already has, or if it is not clear there will be a free and fair election (from an external perspective it really isn’t), then confidence drains out of the wider system very quickly, and one of the earliest things to go in such a situation is speculative investment.

Even if there is a free and non-controversial election, the market might well see risks for the AI companies: would the Democrats, if they make it into power, be so fully on board with letting these companies operate in a low-regulation environment?

And if the bubble should look like bursting for its own reasons in early 2028, will the by then quite stressed federal government, late in the term, actually have the real authority to do anything about it? It’s not a popular government, or a very organised one, and whatever they do will need confidence, co-ordination and an unprecedented level of buy-in

Freedumbs• 1 day ago

because the maga regime operates this way. they make short term policies to inflate the economy that aren't sustainable while in power, then deadlock congress so the time bomb policies are locked in. it's the same play every time, but now insanely brazen as rules only sort of matter sometimes depending on the actor. gop has always wrecked the economy. this is true nationally, state and local levels. the evidence is there if anyone cares to learn. yes all politicians are corrupt. yes, most democrats are also corrupt. that means the system should be reformed to reign in campaign finance. and also prosecute all the criminals. we can't time travel to undo the mistakes, but we can start fixing them today. imprison the traitors.

NoboruWataya• 2 days ago

"hidden" debts and "opaque" funding I seem to read about every other day.

blitzar5• 2 days ago

they should bring back the listicle - it was more honest than the pretend investigation format

moezd• 2 days ago

That doesn't sound good, but out of curiosity: How do you exactly hide debt? Circular economy is easy to understand, but what else is cooking?

alwaysanoobie3• 2 days ago

Oh man,this makes my stomach churn with anxiety.

It's a tough job market out there and it took 4 months to land job offers after being laid off.

I have a competitive offer from Oracle OCI with a team adjacent to this initiative and I am seriously considering it. How long do you guys think it will take to blow up (if it does)

To the experienced devs out there; would you take a 15% less offer from a medium sized company for job security?

actionfromafar3• 2 days ago

Something other than Oracle for only 15% less? Sounds great.

mohamedsayhii• 2 days ago

definitely

blitzar5• 2 days ago

From the "Read Next" section: SoftBank's Son says calling AI a bubble is 'blasphemy'

Softbank always has their finger on the hype pulse ...

I will go against the grain of everyone else - be a hype beast, every crash I have seen they make more and get better jobs on the flip side. Counter Oracle at a higher salary and ask about bonus guarantees for when this all goes to the moon (you have to really really appear to believe).

alwaysanoobie3• 2 days ago

The 15% delta is after negotiations. They didn't allow quarterly vests either.

baxtr• 2 days ago

I am not sure why, but many people (news / media outlets?) love end of world scenarios.

too often pessimists are treated as serious, critical thinkers, while optimists are dismissed as naive or foolish.

remember this guy Michael Burry who saw the 2008 housing crash coming, bet everything against it, and made a fortune?

but then he spent the next 15 years trying to pull off the exact same trick, lost a ton of money fighting a massive bull market, and finally had to shut down his hedge fund because lightning just wouldn't strike twice.

how I deal with this: focus on what you can control. reading news in general seems to be difficult. what can I personally do about all that? very little tbh.

alwaysanoobie3• 1 day ago

Thanks a bunch, this is really nice advice! Jobs would come and go, One should focus on building skills (the thing we can control!)

surgical_fire3• 1 day ago

To the experienced devs out there; would you take a 15% less offer from a medium sized company for job security?

In a hot job market, no.

In the current job market, yes.

It's one of the main reasons I am sticking to my current employer. I could likely make more money by moving jobs right now ; I still get the odd recruiter reaching out here and there; but I fancy the security when I see dark clouds on the horizon.

And oh boy, those clouds are very dark. Foreboding indeed.

Sammi• 1 day ago

You need to listen to what Bryan Cantrill said about his experience at Oracle, before you go there.

What you think of Oracle is even truer than what you think it is: "Shit mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2047s

You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2308s

dizhn2• 2 days ago

The whole world's wealth is being siphoned off by these companies. I hope the very probable crash does not happen.

ndsipa_pomu5• 1 day ago

What would be the alternative scenario to a crash? As I understand it, for AI companies to not crash, they have to end up putting us all out of jobs which will end up with us becoming slaves/serfs.

zamadatix• 1 day ago

Why keep slaves or serfs if AI can do every job better.

dizhn2• 15 hours ago

I don't know who gave them that Utopian end goal but they could just settle slowly into a useful function. They didn't have to inflate so much as to make a crash almost inevitable.

rvz• 1 day ago

The 5 horse men of the AIpocalypse.

But this reminds me of 2008. Because when it goes all wrong, the US government is just going to bail them out just like they did with the banks to just keep the scam going.

Because after all, they will be treated as "too big to fail".

waterTanuki• 23 hours ago

So this is why Masayoshi Son was lashing out at critics recently.

Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding

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