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A comment on US tech giants' hidden AI debt swells 90% to $3.2T in 6 months. Parent comment

Re:US tech giants' hidden AI debt swells 90% to $3.2T in 6 m... by mindwok on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @07:43PM (#50360210)
One possible explanation for this is that it’s basically a systemic failure of the market. Shareholders are pricing companies as if being a winner in the AI boom is the most important thing. Company leadership then must position themselves as a winner, or the market responds by devaluing their share price and they lose their jobs and probably their incentives. The most legible way for leaders to show they’re in the AI race is to spend money on AI infra, even if it means taking on debt to do so.

So if this is in fact a bubble, nobody can really act differently until the market stops treating AI spending as a winning strategy.

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Re:US tech giants' hidden AI debt swells 90% to $3.2T in 6 m... by ifwinterco on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @08:32PM (#50360528)
It’s the same in every bubble, there is a term for it that I can’t remember.

If you’re a Japanese company making spanners in 1988 and you’re not speculating in land while all your competitors are, your profits are going to look terrible in comparison and the board will probably try and fire the leadership and replace them with people who’ll speculate in land

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Re:US tech giants' hidden AI debt swells 90% to $3.2T in 6 m... by BobbyTables2 on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @08:46PM (#50360620)
As much as I dislike it, is there really any alternative?

It’s not like we have any other industry doing well (or could be made to do very well with such an investment that would also pay off).

Maybe a few trillion could allow us to overtake China as the world’s leader in battery technology and manufacturing…

But it would take more time, effort, and a lot of logistics. The payoff from AI is much sooner…

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Re:US tech giants' hidden AI debt swells 90% to $3.2T in 6 m... by somenameforme on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @08:49PM (#50360631)
I don't think the root is shareholders. These numbers are getting absurdly high, and so it's predictably being driven by commercial banks and debt. And lo and behold, the US monetary supply is skyrocketing out of control - up ~6% in a year, more than a trillion dollars, driven primarily by commercial lending. [1] As the bubble starts to shake all we need is for them to start offering them in asset backed packages and we're good to go, or at least as good to go as 2008 was.

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

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Re:US tech giants' hidden AI debt swells 90% to $3.2T in 6 m... by zaik on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @09:03PM (#50360727)
This graph looks pretty normal if you enable log scale.
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Re:US tech giants' hidden AI debt swells 90% to $3.2T in 6 m... by wyager on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @09:33PM (#50360881)
> Shareholders are pricing companies as if being a winner in the AI boom is the most important thing

Well yeah, that's the most obvious way this plays out

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