Cade Metz

Well, some of the debt is taken on in the way you might think.

These companies go to a bank and they borrow the money.

And you know exactly who lent it, who borrowed it, how much it is.

But increasingly, we're seeing other deals where it's hard to see where the debt is and how much of it there is.

A lot of the money is being lent by what are called private credit institutions.

Legally, you can't see inside these companies.

The other thing that's happening is you're seeing the rise of these securities.

They call them asset-backed securities, something that came up during the housing bubble that people may be familiar with.

These securities can be bought and sold and traded.

And that means you don't know, in the end, who is holding the debt.

That's right.

The key word there is could.

There could be a problem.

It's hard to know.

As I said earlier, it's projected that companies across the world will spend nearly $3 trillion on these data centers.

Analysts at Morgan Stanley project that about a third of that will be debt, $1 trillion.

We can't.

If things do burst, it's hard to even know when that might happen.

And people like Sam Altman and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet, the Google parent company, have acknowledged this uncertainty.

It's a great point.