This "debt" is almost solely rental style deals with datacenter constructors. If you make 200k and have a 400k mortgage youre doing just fine.

Datacenters that have not and might not be built to accommodate for future AI demand that may or may not grow to the extent or as fast as the companies anticipate.

Whether the datacenters will end up profitable is a different question than whether they are a real risk for the business. This whole thing could be a massive mistake and all the big tech companies will come out the other end just fine. I think the executives at these companies realize that, this whole build out is a massive case of FOMO. No one wants to be microsoft missing the boat on mobile and theyre willing to flush money away to ensure that never happens.

Windows Mobile predated the iPhone by like 4 years or something. MS didn't miss the boat they steered a crappy boat.

They missed the port.

A 400k mortgage needs a new roof after 25 years. A data center needs its hardware completely replenished after 5 (or less).

Data centers are depreciating assets. I'd class it more like a fancy car than a house.

Your house (hopefully) goes up in value. The datacenter goes down.

Land tends to appreciate, but not so much the rotting box atop it

I bring this up not as a "well, ackshually" but because the datacenter analogy is more similar in that respect...except worse, because now it's a rotting box full of very expensive hardware that hasn't historically held a lot of value until this current shortage

And the hyperscalers have made the (questionable) choice of depreciating that hardware over 6 years rather than the usual 4.