Nobody has heard of the firms feeding fears that the AI bubble could burst. That is apparently the point of them.
Data centres now owe debts measured in the tens of billions of pounds. The sums are large enough to make a bank nervous and small enough that the people borrowing them still describe themselves as builders.
The pitch is always the same. Borrow now, build the future, and the future will repay the lenders. The future has not yet submitted its invoice, but the lenders are already drafting the thank-you letter.
Some of these companies have spent more on cooling systems than they have earned from customers. The cooling systems are real. The customers are, in several cases, other startups that are also borrowing money to buy cooling systems.
Is this a house of cards? Structurally, yes. The cards are just very expensive and have been sold to pension funds.
One firm’s investor deck used the phrase ‘compute moat’ eleven times. A moat is a thing that protects a castle. This one protects a spreadsheet.