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Financing the AI boom: from cash flows to debt [pdf]

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Re: Financing the AI boom: from cash flows to debt [pdf]

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, we won't - there's significant capex on all that infra that will have to be paid down, and we won't have datacenters to help pay for it. AIUI, OP is saying that, with all these DCs with no load, we'll have excess electricity generation capacity that was built to support these DCs. That's the "cheap power" he is talking about, not necessarily "cheap computational power".

And I’m saying the electricity companies will have excess power, but will also have excess debt to service on infrastructure they now don’t need. They’ll get rate hikes approved to force the remaining ratepayers to pay down the capex. Also, a bunch of that money they spent will be on transmission infrastructure that is 100% useless if you aren’t moving that amount of power along exactly that route.

No, the public utilities aren't the ones taking the debt to fund the power generation for some direct data centers.

Companies like Bloom Energy are putting up power plants right next to DCs. If datacenter power demand then these companies will sell back to the grid creating an oversupply.

If the debt load is too high they're need to declare bankruptcy, at which point the bond holders will lose their capital, not the public.

Re: Financing the AI boom: from cash flows to debt [pdf]

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we won't - there's significant capex on all that infra that will have to be paid down, and we won't have datacenters to help pay for it.

+GPUs have significantly shorter useful life spans than say, all the dark fiber laid in the 90s

I'm talking about the Watts used to power the GPUs, not the GPUs themselves.

Re: Financing the AI boom: from cash flows to debt [pdf]

#113
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenRouter is the router. We don't care about their financials, the point is that you can buy inference via them for $x/token on a variety of models for a variety of providers. Those are businesses not propped up by SV VC dreams, just hosting plus compute and their costs. Running a local LLM isn't a mainstream normal thing to do, sure but saying it's "basically 0 of what regular people expect from state of the art LL…

> Those are businesses not propped up by SV VC dreams, just hosting plus compute and their costs. Again, you have no way of knowing this. During a bubble a myriad small companies nobody hears about get funded for millions and billions. Also, plenty of startups max out the founder credit cards and then they go bankrupt. Let's revisit this discussion and see if 10% of all the companies in OpenRouter are around in 2030.…

They're not that bad, and the point is you can run interference on 128 GB VRAM, so we have a floor on the cost of inference.

I'm sure the industry will consolidate by 2030, as industry always does.

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