Derek Thompson

But in exchange, OpenAI is going to get like 10% of AMD.

I mean, it's like, I will buy a billion dollars from you if you give me a billion dollars worth of your stock.

At some point, this whole thing just seems like some incredibly interconnected spider web evaluations.

I guess I wonder how you see this as similar to or distinct from, say, the last bubble in tech, the dot-com bubble.

Is there any reason to worry that a vendor financing model that worked for a stable economic sector, like car buying in the middle of the 20th century...

might, if applied to a brand new sector like AI in the 21st century, present a kind of risk that we haven't seen before and don't know how to fully map onto historical analog.

Your final gauge, gauge five, you call funding quality and the coming credit strain.

By your calculation, about $3 trillion in global data center CapEx is going to be spent in the next three years, $3 trillion.

The big tech companies, which some call the hyperscalers, will be able to cover about half of that.

And the bottom line is that the other half,

The other $1.5 trillion has to come from somewhere else.

Maybe that somewhere else is private credit, securitized finance, new operators, maybe even governments.

A lot of the data center spending, as Paul Kudrowski explained in our previous bubble episode, is happening off book.

It's happening in special purpose vehicles where the hyperscalers are throwing some money into a box and private capital is throwing some money into that box.

The box is going off and buying a data center, but it's off the books of the hyperscalers.

That makes it easier to demonstrate that these companies are profitable even though they're finding ways to finance the guts of artificial intelligence.

Once again, maybe this works out.

It just sounds incredibly messy to me.

How messy does it seem to you?

Let's try to sum up here, because we've gone through so much.