Azeem Azhar

Look, it's quite messy.

The big companies who've had time to build profits and get cash are obviously not needing to do this.

But the younger ones, the Corweaves, which is a new hyperscaler, or OpenAI, need to be able to fund this growth that they're seeing.

And of course, they're going to find more and more spicy ways of doing it.

At this stage, again, just thinking about where we are in the cycle,

These things look exotic rather than poisonous at the moment.

But the question, I think, will be what happens thereafter?

And is there enough transparency?

Can we see what's going on in these SPVs?

Can we really see how far the GPUs have depreciated?

Because if we can't, then that opacity allows all sorts of shenanigans to take place.

And when you look at the way in which these booms turn to bubbles and bust, and I did do some analysis on this, out of the 18 busts that I had enough data to really drill into, the funding quality was the trigger in nine of them.

It was the stressor.

that broke in half of them.

And sometimes it was out and out illegality.

Sometimes it was just that you couldn't see where the risk had gone, as we found with a global financial crisis.

So this is definitely one of the gauges that we need to keep an eye on and hope that the capital markets will do that at this moment where there's probably no one else to look to to keep everyone honest.

I think that's a very, very reasonable summary.

The gauge that matters most is revenue growth.

It is the signal that people want this.