As AI Companies Borrow Billions, Debt Investors Grow Wary (nytimes.com) 43
While stock investors have pushed AI-related shares to repeated highs this year, debt markets are telling a more cautious story as newer AI infrastructure companies find themselves paying significantly elevated interest rates to borrow money. Applied Digital, a data center builder, sold $2.35 billion of debt in November at a 9.25% coupon -- roughly 3.75% above similarly rated companies, or about 70% more in interest costs. The pattern has repeated across several deals.
Wulf Compute, a subsidiary of Bitcoin-miner-turned-data-center-operator Terawulf, raised $3.2 billion in mid-October at 7.75%, well above the 5.5% average yield for similarly rated issuers. Cipher Compute sold $1.7 billion in early November at just over 7%. CoreWeave, which rents data centers and installs computing systems for companies like OpenAI and Meta, raised $1.75 billion in July at 9%. The company's bonds have since fallen to around 90 cents on the dollar, pushing the effective yield above 12% -- nearly double the average for companies at its single-B rating level.
"We just have to be much more pessimistic and not buy into the hype," said Will Smith, a portfolio manager at AllianceBernstein. Construction delays and uncertain demand for AI computing power remain key concerns for lenders who, unlike equity investors, have no upside beyond getting their principal back.
Wulf Compute, a subsidiary of Bitcoin-miner-turned-data-center-operator Terawulf, raised $3.2 billion in mid-October at 7.75%, well above the 5.5% average yield for similarly rated issuers. Cipher Compute sold $1.7 billion in early November at just over 7%. CoreWeave, which rents data centers and installs computing systems for companies like OpenAI and Meta, raised $1.75 billion in July at 9%. The company's bonds have since fallen to around 90 cents on the dollar, pushing the effective yield above 12% -- nearly double the average for companies at its single-B rating level.
"We just have to be much more pessimistic and not buy into the hype," said Will Smith, a portfolio manager at AllianceBernstein. Construction delays and uncertain demand for AI computing power remain key concerns for lenders who, unlike equity investors, have no upside beyond getting their principal back.
Bubble (Score:5, Interesting)
So when does everyone think this AI bubble is going to burst? Personally, I plan to do some major shifts in my 401k come the new year as while I've seen some great gains lately I feel like we don't have much time left until the crash happens.
Re:Bubble (Score:5, Insightful)
You are at least 100 years early on expecting this to happen. We still don't have AI replacing the majority of jobs. We don't even have AI call centers replacing the customer service people. So, while a lot of potential is there, AI isn't killing too many jobs YET. It will take at least 20-50 years before robotics will be replacing the workers at Amazon in the warehouses. So, right now, it's all hype based on the potential for AI, and yet, it's causing problems with water, electricity, and other things due to infrastructure having been neglected for such a long time.
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ChatGPT is only 3 years old. Your numbers and tone are incredibly overconfident.
Your narrative is also wrong. Many jobs have already been killed in essence: Translators, voice actors, all kinds of artists. Maybe not the exceptional ones, but certainly the mediocre ones. Tell those people that it's all hype and that they don't have to protest anything or find an entirely new career.
Plenty of other jobs are very, very close to being so, including the ones you've mentioned. A lot of support jobs like in call c
Re:Bubble (Score:5, Insightful)
Bursting of the bubble will not be the end of money,
but money alone might be less worth,
and I would say when the bubble bursts,
we will have a bank run.
Because this bubble and inflated stocks are built on debt, .. or in this case "trust me ai Bro."
so its Lehman Bros. again
Food reserves, drinking water reserves, dish washer soap,
DIY energy and so on is important.
btw. (Score:2)
I forgot to mention the bubble will not burst,
it has already started to burst, so it will be a very quick trickle down.
My indicator of the beginning -> Oracle Stock, since October 2025
a very sharp decline.
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I don't think it really matters. Even if something incredibly useful and lucrative comes out of it, (so far, it's just a money sink) to me, the industry is so over leveraged that you're going to see a lot of this bottom out in a way that makes a pretty good dent in the rest of the global economy. The usual suspects here will be excited for sure!
https://knowyourmeme.com/photo... [knowyourmeme.com]
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I don't think it really matters.
I relate to it, as the dotcom bubble over again, that previous bubble actually paved the way with extended build up of high speed fiber connections, along with accelerated 3G runup, also the bases and accelerated roll out for the web techniques we use today was laid in that time span (Web 2.0). And the burst bubble just shed of the debt, the money from some of our own greed that fueled that market like the proverbial carrot was deleted
The usual suspects ..
The good thing about the usual suspects is that they also rely on money.
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I don't think it really matters.
I relate to it, as the dotcom bubble over again, that previous bubble actually paved the way with extended build up of high speed fiber connections, along with accelerated 3G runup, also the bases and accelerated roll out for the web techniques we use today was laid in that time span (Web 2.0). And the burst bubble just shed of the debt, the money from some of our own greed that fueled that market like the proverbial carrot was deleted
The usual suspects ..
The good thing about the usual suspects is that they also rely on money. And Musk, Ellison, Zuckerberg the evil uneven triplets are heavily relying on stock prices, and these triplets do stand for both sides of your example as they are both liberitarian as well as authoritarian. And when you take a look at the intertwined deals of "Musk Industries", that house of cards will likely collapse into large portions of his pocket.
The question you have to ask when it comes to the big money movers is, do they care about money as it exists? Or do they care much, much more about how much of the value of the overall market they hold, regardless of whether money is the indicator. If the dollar loses all value, will Musk, Bezos, et al, give a flying fuck so long as they still hold the vast majority of whatever is considered wealth going forward? I don't know for certain that they care, but I also don't know that they don't care. Maybe they
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I would say this is likely to happen.
It all depends on the judgement for a company if the company provides a "real" value - in the "old sense".
However these current companies with a real value core will shrink quite substantial.
I compared that just recently in a discussion with collegues to the "Deutsche Telekom"(*) from the 2000s, its also still around, but it has cost many people of their savings - due to their new found interest in the stock market.
Using the 2000s and the 2008s as a base scheme, many com
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Around midterm elections. That will cause a chain reaction that will make the bubble pop.
We'll be at war by that time. Hard to predict anything.
Re: Bubble (Score:3)
I'd stay invested in the big players until small players start going bankrupt, I think. Companies like Google, Microsoft, etc. that act as cloud providers for small AI companies will continue to see money coming in right up until the end. And once AI pulls back, they are still left with valuable infrastructure.
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Thanks, I'm kind of rolling around in my head what options I have right now and that looks like solid advice.
Re:Bubble (Score:5, Interesting)
Like physical bubbles, the "AI bubble" isn't a single, big bubble that will burst all at once. Rather, it's a vast number of small, medium-sized, and large bubbles, that will burst at many times along the timeline. Some are already bursting, like the slashdot story about Indian firms being pai to clean up AI messes.
Also like physical bubbles, there is some actual usefulness in the underlying soap. Not everything about AI will disappear into thin air. Like the dot-com bubble, the best of AI will remain long-term.
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Incidentally, the constant denial by some morons here is another sign the bubble may not take long to burst.
Re: The Great AI Collapse of 2026 is beginning (Score:2)
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It's a computer program FAKING intelligence.
I'd like to say this is on the one side true, and I can relate to the assumption about ML not being "real" intelligence, but on the other hand there are so many descissions we humans make based soley on the training and the weights in our own neural network, that to predict a general collapse is really short sighted. How much of our own life is actually "real" intelligence, and not just a neural network generating an answer to an input? One striking example where statistical methods are very good and extr
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It doesn't matter if AI is "faking" intelligence, it still does many useful things. Just in the last month, I wrote my first Vue.js web app. GitHub Copilot shortened my learning curve *enormously*. When I wanted to do some thing that were off-the-beaten-path, like an intentional component circular reference, it came up with a solution that actually worked. Without AI, it would have taken me many more weeks to get my first app running.
The solution is IPOs (Score:4)
Boo-hoo for the billionaires. I’m actually extremely pro-capitalist, so I’m fine with what the trillionaires have been doing, but they’ve tapped out the people with lots of idle cash-in-the-bank who will fork it over to anyone in a hoodie who says “AI and crypto”. Anyone with $$$ that still want to invest are a) in equities or b) getting more careful about demanding things like “return on investment” and “sound business plans”.
So, the trillionaires can either give up some equity control in exchange for cash/capital, or make due with the money they have. This is capitalism behaving as intended.
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What is the problem we are solving?
Investors growing weary, is a good, healthy thing in a frothy market. It helps bring common sense to the market.
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Exactly. Just like the dot-com bubble of the 1990s.
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Pretty sure they're looking at door #3, "World's biggest bust-out".
Just look at all that money consumed by zero-marginal-product grannies. Surely that money would be better-employed on AI girlfriends for incels.
Ratings Company Nonsense (Score:5, Interesting)
The debt rating companies are usually behind in evaluating the creditworthiness of a company.
Debt rating companies have two near (?) conflict of interests:
1) The debt rating companies get paid by the company issuing the debt
2) The debt rating companies want repeat customers and do not want to scare away other possible customers
The debt rating companies rarely update the credit rating of older debt issues as they do not earn a fee for doing so.
Looking at the interest rate spread to risk-free US Treasury bonds of the same maturity is one way to evaluate the new debt issues.
Cautious? But why? (Score:1)
Re: New industry opening up soon (Score:2)
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AI debt collection, leg and finger breaker
I can't wait for the hallucinations!
Low Margin Commodity (Score:3, Interesting)
So far investors have been pretty dumb about distinguishing between 1) AI companies that are actually creating AI technology, 2) Companies that are using the technology 3) Companies providing commodity infrastructure for the technology. But they seem to finally be catching on.
News at 11 (Score:1)
OMG! Investors in a bubble start to fear that the bubble might explode and cover them with shit-for-brains!
It's really sad that things have gotten to this point. Maybe said investors should have suspected it was a bubble long before it got this big? After all, lots of folks in the Tech community have been sounding that alarm almost since the beginning.
I expect that ... (Score:2)
Downfall of Oracle (Score:3)
Go big debt and bust... (Score:2)
Duh (Score:2)