This scheme had pissed off bankers that a company muscled in on their turf, created lots of debt in a time when US debt was already sky high and becoming unpopular, relied on GPU depreciation being low (implying tech progress was slow, which didn't gel with the singularity crowd), and getting crazy rich in the process.
I don't even know how China factors into this other than competing with the US
Weird if true, because businesses having a side-line in financing their customers is extremely common. Most large retailers, car dealers etc all do it. Sometimes they outsource to a third party, but sometimes they do it all in house. In a few cases they end up making more money as a finance company than the business they started in.
I've seen it be done with consumers and small B2B but not big giant business finance like this before.
So are most of the shareholders: most of this crap is off of the balance sheet until (if) it comes online!
In the first nine months of 2026, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Oracle spent $556.9 billion on capital expenditures against $542.9 billion in operating cash flow, leaving their combined quarterly at -$33 billion.
Off-balance-sheet AI obligations across MSFT, AMZN, GOOGL, META, and ORCL are roughly $3.2 trillion (nearly six times capex).
Oracle is doing cute stuff like locking itself into 15 to 19 year facility leases while only signing customer contracts lasting up to five years. Some sites, they can’t even finish building.
It would be historically entertaining if all the ai hype crowd found out they have been hyping a ccp scheme to crash the us economy to the point where even the military was cheering it on. But the truth is, this is just how business works now that billionaires and trillionaires can do what they want.
I want what's best for the US but acting this slowly puts any meaningful repercussions for this behavior into the realm of theatrics rather then lessons learned. Oh well I guess some people got really wealthy so we should all be cheering while the price of food and everything else is insane.