Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bis.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 113 posts

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

#71

Post by drdexebtjl »

andsoitis wrote: post #67
yndoendo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too big to fail is an oxymorononic statement. Bailing out bad businesses retains those that poorly managed them. Those organizations should of been sold off to remove the bad actors. AI is currently a sunk cost to the US stock industry that is repeating the bad actor scenario. Not a single AI company is profitable and none of them produce deterministic nor cost effective solutions Microsoft's statment of using AI to…

> Both industries heavy use legal bribes, donations. Politicians will gladly bail them out to take ℅ of the cut in bribes. Are you saying that it is likely that at some point in the not too distant future, OpenAI and Anthropic will need bailout-size cash infusions from the US Government to continue existence and that the US government will do it and not face severe political consequences? I just don't think that chai…

It wouldn’t be the first time the US government made expensive and unpopular moves in the name of national security and walked away largely unscathed.

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

#72

Post by blackqueeriroh »

edoceo wrote: post #45
doctorwho42 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have to spend it on hardware with such short use-life to spend down those dragon hoards... The amount of money we are talking about could have given the entire US high speed commuter rail.

Or every teacher gets classroom supplies for five years. Or treatment programs for addicts. There are a lot of economic benefits to helping folks on the lower side of the income spectrum.

But it wouldn’t have been so who cares? It’s a counterfactual.

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

#73

Post by estetlinus »

etskinner wrote: post #46
jordanb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moreover what would a bailout even look like? The banks got loan guarantees from the government essentially. But like what happens if the government guarantees open ai's loans if the company is structurally unprofitable? Does the government create an operating subsidy?

Inference is cheap, only the training is expensive. Both Bernie and Trump have suggested doing a partial government takeover of the big AI companies to start a sovereign wealth fund. So it would look like the government taking ownership, letting investors lose their stake, and then operating as inference-only, which would turn a profit

Inference is cheap as long as you have 1000 data centers full of GPUs. The only crux is you have neither.

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

#74

Post by arjie »

paulhebert wrote: post #66
arjie wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but taxing 50% of all earnings below $100k could also do that. What money can be spent on is fine but I think we’ve got a good system where people can have reward for economic output and they can use that to allocate money where they want. There are places with central planning and I don’t like them. Personally, I’d rather the money be spent on datacenters. And as it goes, the guys with the money also would pref…

You would rather build data centers than buy school supplies or implement a nationwide high speed commuter rail network?

Yes.

To do the latter things as a substitute would require appropriation of other people's money to spend on highly captured industries. I'd rather that not happen.

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

#75

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #59

Speaking of financing: how is the Anthropic IPO going, what is the timeline? They filed over a month ago, no news since. (I would have expected some spectacular news headlines that would be designed to fuel public interest in the impending IPO, but can't detect anything of substance)

just recalled: some significant open source projects are being rewritten in Rust, with the help of Claude. I don't know if these efforts will be successful in the long run, but in some way these news headlines may be creating a media dynamic as part of the IPO preparations?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48870966 pgrust passes 100% of the Postgres regression tests

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837877 Rewriting Bun in Rust

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48789325 My AI-built PHP engine in Rust passes 17% of PHP-src tests, renders WordPress (ekinertac.com)

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

#76

Post by sapphicsnail »

arjie wrote: post #48
edoceo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or every teacher gets classroom supplies for five years. Or treatment programs for addicts. There are a lot of economic benefits to helping folks on the lower side of the income spectrum.

Yeah but taxing 50% of all earnings below $100k could also do that. What money can be spent on is fine but I think we’ve got a good system where people can have reward for economic output and they can use that to allocate money where they want. There are places with central planning and I don’t like them. Personally, I’d rather the money be spent on datacenters. And as it goes, the guys with the money also would pref…

We have central planning just not by a government

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

#77

Post by HWR_14 »

blobbers wrote: post #19

At least if the datacenters usage crashes, we'll have cheap power from all the infra that got built.

Public utilities tend to pass on all their costs to their customers. If the data centers crumble, that just means the remaining customers (business and residential) each will have to pick up a larger share of the debt payments for the buildout.

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

#78

Post by webnrrd2k »

redwood wrote: post #11

I've seen other reports that suggest the level of investment for eclipses the internet buid out in 2000 and the railroad boom more than a century earlier. I wonder if they use different ways of landing on these wildly different assessments

Manhattan Project: $36B, 5 years

▫ Apollo Program: $257B, 14 years

▫ Interstate Highway System: $620B, 37 years

▫ AI data centers: $930B, 6 years and still accelerating

From: https://substack.com/@rubendominguez/note/c-244929068

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

#79

Post by dataflow »

andsoitis wrote: post #67
yndoendo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too big to fail is an oxymorononic statement. Bailing out bad businesses retains those that poorly managed them. Those organizations should of been sold off to remove the bad actors. AI is currently a sunk cost to the US stock industry that is repeating the bad actor scenario. Not a single AI company is profitable and none of them produce deterministic nor cost effective solutions Microsoft's statment of using AI to…

> Both industries heavy use legal bribes, donations. Politicians will gladly bail them out to take ℅ of the cut in bribes. Are you saying that it is likely that at some point in the not too distant future, OpenAI and Anthropic will need bailout-size cash infusions from the US Government to continue existence and that the US government will do it and not face severe political consequences? I just don't think that chai…

> Are you saying that it is likely that at some point in the not too distant future, OpenAI and Anthropic will need bailout-size cash infusions from the US Government to continue existence and that the US government will do it and not face severe political consequences?

Didn't they say this themselves? https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/06/tech/openai-backtracks-go...

> The current administration pays very close attention voter sentiment.

Is that how the Anti-Weaponization Fund came about?

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

#80

Post by whateveracct »

etskinner wrote: post #46
jordanb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moreover what would a bailout even look like? The banks got loan guarantees from the government essentially. But like what happens if the government guarantees open ai's loans if the company is structurally unprofitable? Does the government create an operating subsidy?

Inference is cheap, only the training is expensive. Both Bernie and Trump have suggested doing a partial government takeover of the big AI companies to start a sovereign wealth fund. So it would look like the government taking ownership, letting investors lose their stake, and then operating as inference-only, which would turn a profit

But you have to keep training
Post reply on HN