Replying to @⁨danc4498@lemmy.world⁩

My favorite quote from The Big Short:

In the years that followed, hundreds of bankers and rating agency executives went to jail. The SEC was completely overhauled, and Congress had no choice but to break up the big banks and regulate the mortgage and derivatives industries.

Just kidding. Banks took the money the American people gave them, and they used it to pay themselves huge bonuses, and lobby the Congress to kill big reform. And then they blamed immigrants and poor people, and this time even teachers.

Replying to @⁨BauerBender@lemmy.world⁩

I was very aware of what 2008 was like.

We need some kind of massive reset in this economy, we can’t just keep line going up. The current economy is built on eggshells and even if the tech industry doesn’t implode, there are plenty of other things happening that will cause one anyway. We WILL have a full blown recession/depression again. It’s just a matter of when.

Replying to @⁨HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org⁩

I can’t wait for PC parts to be super cheap. I saw somewhere that, bubble-pop-notwithstanding, NVME production is projected to hit a level within a year or so that will outpace even the last year’s demand for storage and could even drive prices for storage down to below what they were prior to the bubble. Oh, and that’s even accounting for inflation. So when the bubble does pop, we are going to have an absolute storage glut.

The fact that the rest of the world is going to be miserable and impossible is another matter entirely, but at least I’ll have my hobby.

Replying to @⁨lath@lemmy.world⁩

Yep, that is indeed a fantastic idea. I don’t have a pension myself, just a 401k and some IRAs, but I’ve diversified most of my investments away from “AI” bullshit, as well as largely away from US things in general, because the US is absolutely going to be the nexus of the coming shitstorm. Amusingly, this has also helped me to more or less beat inflation with my investment accounts, which is a nice perk.

Replying to @⁨HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org⁩

Probably related to the now three Oracle data center that can’t get electricity.

Wisconsin passed a law that fast tracking large projects requires a high credit rating or collateral, to pay secure costs for building the power plants needed for the data center. In July Oracle’s debt rating was downgraded to near junk levels.

That means Oracle can no longer get Wisconsin to supply power to the data center so it’s a $15 billion dollar paper weight. Thats putting even further downward pressure on their credit rating and ability to secure loans to meet their $500B in obligations.

Now Oracle’s New Mexico data center is stuck due to contract issues with water and gas turbines, so they can’t move foreward. Oracle has a 9% interest rate on the loans to build that, then they raise 2% after construction, because their credit rating is dogshit. So now Oracle is claiming force majeur to get out of their increased debt obligations, which you can imagine, is killing interest in lending to them.

In Texas they just blocked new grid hookups over political backlash to skyrocketing electricity prices. That killed another Oracle expansion they just canceled, and another one is trucking in gas for gas turbines as an alternative to the electrical grid, which you might imagine is expensive.

Which brings us to now. The banks are looking at local opposition blocking these projects (local action is working), states are blocking them to avoid getting voted out, hardware costs are shooting up, and the assets backing these loans are too small for so much investment.

So the level of risk no longer works.

—

My personal theory is that Oracle is a sacrificial lamb. It’s a dead end tech company that lives on licensing fees, and they’ve fucked themselves on these expansions. They’re failing at being a hyper-scaler as margins decrease.

I bet we see someone take Oracle private when their stock collapses, freeing the board of fiduciary duty to the stakeholders with a payout. This move is critical because it blocks other hyperscalers from putting in an offer to acquire their assets to shore up debt.

OpenAI will acquire the now private Oracle through a special funding round and buy up their hardware for pennies on the dollar. This will absolve them of the debt obligations Oracle has to OpenAI that have killed their credit ($500b), and stabilizes the Oracle balance sheet.

OpenAI will write this down and offer Oracle’s creditors equity stakes in lieu of cash, and will have acquired all their next gen hardware far cheaper than their competitors.

This might even fuck over Nvidia, the incestuous funders of the AI circlejerk. If Oracle gets to write off their GPU debts then Nvidia loses a fuck ton of sales, tanking their stock price — they take that OpenAI equity offer and look like they’re playing the game. OpenAI wants to build their own chips anyways, just look at jalapeño.

Replying to @⁨panda_abyss@lemmy.ca⁩

I don’t think it says anything about specific data center risks: capitalizing loans is standard operating procedure for these banks. It gets the loans off their account books, so they don’t have to hold capital to balance the risk, but they still get to collect management fees on the loans, regardless of whether they default. The big stories back in the 00s were residential real estate loans, but they do the same thing for commercial and industrial property.

Replying to @⁨halfapage@lemmy.world⁩

I offer you an IOU. I’m on a good streak, and the IOU is that I’ll pay you back over time with interest.

You accept. You then find 9 other people offering IOUs of varying reliability.

You package up all the IOUs into an asset group. In theory we all pay you back regularly, but some of us will not. With 10 IOUs it’s unlikely we’ll all default, so the asset is safer and your risk models can assess this.

You still have the same amount of debt and risk on your hands.

You turn sell the rights to the payouts from the group, in exchange for cash now, because paying $X for payback of Y% interest over Z years with Q risk is an easy to reason about deal.

But your potential buyers squabble over Q, some don’t want to lose anything, some want to be risky.

So you split that risk level out into groups and say “if the overall goes down, this group pays first, then this group, then this group”, and you’ve created a securitized asset.

You’ve now sold off these assets to various groups, with defined risk levels, and you’ve made back money to offset what you paid out to the initial 10 IOUs.

Now imagine you took IOUs from crack addicts who are talking a lot about the power transformer behind the mall. They say they need money for tools and this will be the big one. You’re intrigued.

Odds are good this will pay off you think, those crackheads were excited and confident.

Later that day you hear sirens. Like, a lot of sirens. It’s coming from the mall area. Huh.

You still haven’t sold off all the slices of your asset, you were maybe hoping for more upside, and selling can take a while. But those sirens… they’re concerning.

Maybe it’d be a good idea to swap out your asset for another one, or offer those slices at a discount for some higher than expected risk. So you go out and start making phone calls hoping someone else isn’t worried about it. The only people who are less worried are a biker gang you normally wouldn’t do business with, but you figure for a discount they’re happy to deal with the crackheads.

(This was more about securities than recapitalizing, but kinda the idea)

Replying to @⁨panda_abyss@lemmy.ca⁩

My impression is that commercial loan securitization is a little different.

When you’re talking about residential mortgages, you’re talking about loans of a few hundred thousand, which is kind of too small for capital markets to bother. So the banks bundle them, like you say, and sell them in $1e8-1e10 offerings… Pension fund’s gotta park $100,000,000 somewhere, and that MBS is easier than actually managing 500 separate loans.

When you’re talking about commercial real estate - and especially things as big as data centers - it’s the opposite problem. They need such big loans that only a big bank or even consortium of big banks can get all the capital together, then the big bank turns the loan into a bond offering, so investors can buy them in slices as small as $1e4… That bond may only have one or two loans in it, so it can’t necessarily get broken into risk tranches like the MBS.

Replying to @⁨panda_abyss@lemmy.ca⁩

they wouldn’t sign such stupid deals for no reason.

Greed. The reason was greed. They bought into the hype and thought they could print money.

And all the tech companies are doing it, Oracle was just the sick man of the bunch, and will be the first to fall, dragging the rest down with them.

All because they’re offloading trillions in debt to special purpose vehicles, the same thing that tanked Enron, the difference is that Enron, with $400 million in debt, was lying about it, and the current tech companies doing the exact same shit, are disclosing the debt legally, but still hiding it in the fine print of their disclosures.

The debt will still crash the economy, but at least it’s out in the open?

Replying to @⁨chaogomu@lemmy.world⁩

Also Larry is not nearly as sharp or thorough as he used to be, and he’s turned into a bit of a crumugeonly headstrong dick in his old age. No 82 year old is as sharp as they ised to be, despite how people like to lie about it. No 70 year old feels 40 anymore either. He has made numerous mistakes inside Oracle, and now he has run the whole company straight off a cliff, as aging boomers will tend to do.

Replying to an earlier post

The Foxconn deal was always a scam, I doubt they learned anything from it, other than to deny before the midterms and then cave to them after, which is I presume the plan.

Wisconsin is so heavily gerrymandered they have one of the worst state governments in the country, and they used to have one of the best.

Edit: Although maybe their supreme court ungerrymandered the state part, or was it the fed part? Either way, they are all crooks and will side with big money after the election you better believe they will try.

Replying to @⁨HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org⁩

$40B for banks are pennies. This website writes about $1.5T debt plan trough 2028 axis-intelligence.com/ai-data-center-financing-st…

That’s still not much compared to gross profit for 2025 of the 5 biggest players listed on US stock exchange Google $240B
Amazon $360B
Microsoft $225B
Meta $164B
Nvidia $153B

Sums up to $1.1T

Oracle will get bailout or those investments will be acquired 100% if you think billionaires won’t protect themselves from basically owning this planet you’re stupid.

AI data center financing statistics 2026 — corporate bonds and private credit data, Axis Intelligence Research hyperscaler bond issuance and off-balance-sheet lease data for AI infrastructure 2026Axis IntelligenceAI Data Center Financing Statistics 2026: Bonds, Private Credit, and the $1.5 Trillion Gap - Axis IntelligenceCorporate bonds, private credit, and the $1.5T gap: Axis Intelligence Research's definitive data on how hyperscalers are funding the AI buildout in 2026. AI Data Center Financing Statistics 2026 Update.

Replying to @⁨HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org⁩

I work in commercial real estate. This is a normal common practice in commercial real estate. They honestly do this for pretty much every type of real estate and for as many as they can.

They securitize it in portfolios and sell off interest in those payments to others. They intentionally mix and match properties in portfolios so if one fails, there is less risk to the whole thing.

I’ve seen fast food restaurants, malls, airports, billboards, cell towers, hollywood studios, aerospace firms, law firms, hotels, apartments, everything. And yes, also data centers

Replying to @⁨HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org⁩

I can’t advise on other assets. I can only speak to commercial real estate securitizations, which is what the article is referring to.

In commercial real estate, they mix lots of different types of properties up into portfolios and they try to balance it out so if an office building fails, it won’t bankrupt investors.

These types of portfolios are safe because they invoke less risk overall. It’s the same reason why your 401k portfolio has a bunch of different companies and not just Apple or Tesla stock.

It won’t gain value as fast as a single stock, but it is less likely to lose value overall and is a safer risk.

Replying to @⁨HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org⁩

It’s happening!!! Bubble pop is happening!!! article is underplaying it.

Coreweave debt pushed towards 16% yield today. The worst of the AI clusterfuck. Oracle, 2nd worse, move to 8% which is still absurdly low, but was holding 6% a week ago.

Main headline, yes the big banks are selling off debt to losertards. At a discount. Insurance companies are the losertards chasing yield, but have big losses today.

Nvidia, the circular financing backstop for the bubble, signaled today that it is just waiting for bankruptcies to swoop in instead of propping up the fraud. Bond/share holders will get crushed, and bubble dead, but still Nvidia will drive rampocalypse if the datacenters are still alllowed.

Replying to @⁨BigMacHole@thelemmy.club⁩

Dont worry, they will wait for the current tranche of laws to pass cementing that we can never create taxes specifically on the wealthy in the future. Like Californias prop 42

calmatters.org/…/newsom-tax-propositions-november…

Wasington’s IP26-645. Iowa’s comnstitutional ammendment. North Carolinas “constitional taxpayer protections”. Missouri’s ammendment 5.

Protecting the wealthys money is all the rage lately, a brand new booming legislative goldrush.

Then they will let the AI bubble implode-- not before. We have a few months still. Live it up. Play the market like its still the gilded age.

Replying to @⁨800XL@lemmy.world⁩

I HATE this part. I have no power to just not invest, because Vanguard or whoever owns the portfolio and they think this stuff is just going up-up-up, but they are playing with my money since I only have 4 flavors of their choosing for my 401k.

They might be right in the short term, and this used to be a thing (I think, in my parent’s age) where you could assume that number-goes-up over time and you could ignore minor dips, and maybe it’s still true for a long enough duration… but:

In this thread, I think we all see that this isn’t sustainable, but we, normal people just hoping to retire someday, don’t have the ability to disconnect from the bubble even if we want to. There are too many public companies involved and they’re all interconnected.

I despise that I’m probably invested in spacex, nvidia, oracle, etc. I’d sacrifice short term gains to let other people take this risk if I could.

Replying to @⁨AdolfSchmitler@lemmy.world⁩

Do you think they can maintain that for another 5 years? Another 20?

I think expecting NVIDIA to fail inside the next five years is a wild reach. You might expect Oracle to take haircut in the next five years, based on their atrocious debt load. But even then, the idea that they’ll miss a credit payment?

Twenty years out, these firms are an even safer bet. Long term demand for compute and hosting services is only going up. And they’re so heavily consolidated. Too Big To Fail in every sense of the word. Are you going to bet against JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs on the eve of the financial crisis, even? Twenty years later, how are they doing?

Are 5 AI companies providing more value than every other tech company in the last 50 years?

It’s not a question of value, it’s a question of earnings growth. Will these top 5 AI companies be seeing stratospheric earnings growth in the next ten years? All signs point to “Yes”. The race to cement these data center footprints is a scramble for limited resources. The Capex budgets won’t be inflated to this degree forever.

Dismissing them for their rapid expansion would be like betting against New York and Chicago real estate markets because you didn’t trust skyscrapers to be profitable in another 20 years. Or betting against U.S. Steel and Standard Oil at the apex of WW2, because the resource demand from the conflict can’t go on forever.

Replying to @⁨AdolfSchmitler@lemmy.world⁩

I don’t see it happening; Copilot was a failed proof of concept that crippled the Windows ecosystem and permanently tarnished Microslop’s reputation as the premier operating-system developer; the Linux community doesn’t openly embrace AI much at all, and gamers couldn’t care less about it… All the LLM services have been running at a consistent loss/debt, and CoreWeave is propped up by the only 2 companies that couldn’t even successfully launch a finished product. They need to cut their losses and pack it in; call it a day!

Replying to @⁨UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world⁩

They’ve been the pack leader in the tech sector for decades.

So what did they do that was crazy long bad bet .com? Them existing in the .com days leaves nothing to the discussion at hand.

Amazon was at least standing up storefronts and cloud at that point.

The MAG7 have been outperforming the rest of the market since COVID, often by 5+%

What does this have to do with Tech bubble vs AI bubble? Are you interested in being on topic or just arguing?

Replying to @⁨rumba@lemmy.zip⁩

So what did they do that was crazy long bad bet .com?

Windows ME leaps to mind. Internet Explorer giving up enormous market share to Chrome and Netscape. Fumbling Search for twenty years. Take your pick

What does this have to do with Tech bubble vs AI bubble?

The Tech Bubble was largely small cap startups. AI is prevailing B2B and SaaS.

Also “bubble” only means something in hindsight. You keep saying AI is going to crash. Where’s the crash? I’ve been reading this prediction for half a decade

Replying to @⁨HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org⁩

The part nobody prices in is the stranded-asset scenario. These underwritings assume a demand curve that keeps rising for a decade. If inference efficiency improves the way training efficiency did — and there’s real pressure in that direction now — a lot of this capacity gets repriced hard.

The bank behavior is the tell: debt that gets packaged and sold on right after underwriting is the classic ‘we have concerns but we’re not holding the bag’ move.

Replying to @⁨joey_builds@eviltoast.org⁩

I would say there are definite advances for inference. Custom backends built by AI for specific models, such as Strata, makes efficient leveraging of hardware much easier. Engrams, such as those in Qwen Next-Flash, allows for using more parameters via SSD, rather than memory alone.

These and other things over the past few years have allowed me to use bigger models, faster. Given another year of such progress, I think the value of subscribing to big American companies would start drying up.

Replying to @⁨HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org⁩

My youtube algorthim is filled with AI-skeptics (Eli the Computer guy, Ed Zitron, Prof G Markets) so this has been the slowest car crash I’ve ever gotten to watch happen. If Donald had actually focused on inflation all of these debt-sensitive AI plays could’ve continued to whistle through the graveyard. The skeptics have called out coreweave as being potentially the first domino to topple and their 6 year debt is trading at 15% right now. Thanks to plummeting token costs, they need to double their token sales every 90 days.

Replying to @⁨uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone⁩

Each one of the content creators ais subject to the same forces that the algorithm creates. No matter where you start, the content plus the algorithm slowly pushes you as well as the content creators into one direction. It may be a weak force, but it’s always there. content creators who want to grow their views do not have the liberty to evade it.

The direction is always towards divisive positions and decreasingly evidence based arguments, generally anti institutional, anti science, anti journalistic media.

YouTube as a feed is poison for a healthy mindset.

Replying to @⁨ripcord@lemmy.world⁩

Doesn’t seem any closer today than, say, 2 years ago.

Have you seen what small, open-weight models from Chinese labs are capable of doing on consumer-grade hardware? They’re much more advanced than any flagship LLM running on VERY expensive hardware, 2 years ago.

I have no idea how close we might (or might not) be to the bubble bursting, but surely it’s closer than 2 years ago.