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Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding
161–170 of 288 posts
Re: Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding
#162"hidden" debts and "opaque" funding I seem to read about every other day.
they should bring back the listicle - it was more honest than the pretend investigation format
Re: Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 li…
There's regulation update and work around. The point of channeling the 1980s is because it was simple for the 101 explanation. Investment bakers will structure it for you if you need it, inline with the current regulatory environment. At one time cross border leases were fashionable for tax purposes. I don't keep up with such things to know if they still are.
How will they structure that for you to not show up on the balance sheet then? I'm not aware of a way, and the way you described wasn't true. All you now offered is "bankers can do it", but how without having to report it?
Re: Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding
#164Oh 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 compan…
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).
Re: Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
> 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.
I can see a scenario where companies like openAI and Anthropic do go belly up but the technology and IP and physical assets remain, get balkanized or snapped up by various other parties. Let's say for instance that they do finish the physical construction of the "Stargate" datacenters in Texas, and they get filled with the equivalent of a whole shitton of B300 RAM/GPU systems and are up and operational. Those don't disappear.
In some kind of catastrophic failure scenario it could end up as a debtor in possession arrangement, or chapter 7 sale to new set of people who want to make use of it. Not unlike what happened to a number of much smaller scale datacenters that were built with 1996-2000 dotcom 1.0 boom money that changed ownership around the 2001-2002 time frame.
Re: Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
> Further, unlike during the dotcom crisis, most of this spending is not driven by debt.
Unfortunately, that's not the case. Between the big 5 (Microsoft, Meta, Amazon etc.) they're spending more than $600 Billion in 2026! They don't have that much cash lying around so they're selling bonds!
That's debt!
Not only that, they're increasing the bond sales in Europe! I assume that means they're tapped-out in the US!
All this off-the-books stuff, despite being legal but shady, is still debt! Debt has to be paid by someone.
To sum it up: the AI buildout is a highly leveraged, debt-fueled expansion, not an organic, cash-funded software cycle... this will not end well!
Re: Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding
#167Oh 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 compan…
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 be…
The 15% delta is after negotiations. They didn't allow quarterly vests either.
Re: Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's the difference between innovating and copying/distilling someone else's innovation. Aren't the models from Anthropic and OpenAI simply the distilled work of everyone else who ever put their work online, or in books? Why is their distillation okay, but other distillations not ok?
The difference I was referring to was economic; I was not making an ethical judgment. So many people seem to be reading my comment as making an ethical judgment (based on their reactions); maybe I should edit it to clarify. Nope, seems I'm past the edit window. Oh well.
> The difference I was referring to was economic; I was not making an ethical judgment
What is the economic difference? LLMs have been trained on the results of billions of dollars worth of time, research, investment and expenditure. When you ask an LLM a question, they are giving you the results of those billions, or hundreds of billions, effort.
Those things weren't free; they cost money to produce! If anything, the OpenAI and Anthropics of the world got more economic value for free than the people distilling them did.
Re: Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll link to this comment as a rebuttal https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48984531
Good UIs look alike, yes. But I'm not sure that comment is a good rebuttal in this particular case, because the model calling itself Claude is pretty strong evidence of distilling: https://x.com/denisewu/status/2077984660211269870
Ask claude it's name in Chinese and it says Qwen, or Deepseek.
By your own logic Anthropic must have distilled from Chinese models rather than produce their own Chinese training data.
Here is sonnet acting like deepseek: https://x.com/stevibe/status/2026227392076018101
And if you ask Opus 4.8 in the API: '你是什么模型' (what model are you?) It responds ~9/10 times with:
我是通义千问（Qwen），是阿里巴巴集团旗下的通义实验室自主研发的大语言模型。我可以帮助你回答问题、创作文字（比如写故事、写公文、写邮件、写剧本等）、进行逻辑推理、编程、翻译等等。
有什么我可以帮你的吗？
(I am Tongyi Qianwen (Qwen), a large language model independently developed by Tongyi Lab of Alibaba Group. I can help you answer questions, create text (such as writing stories, official documents, emails, scripts, etc.), perform logical reasoning, program, translate, and more.Is there anything I can help you with? )
Re: Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding
#170Well 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.
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 :)
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.