Tens of billions in AI debt is secured by GPU clusters. But the part that makes a cluster worth the loan is the team running it, and that is the one asset no lender can seize.
Economics
The AI boom's collateral is a team you can't repossess
The scariest cloud bill is the one that looks right
AWS just showed customers trillion-dollar bills. The real exposure is the small metering error you can't see, on a consumption cost you can neither audit nor cap.
Same model, ten times the bill
A cached token costs a tenth of a fresh one, and coding agents hit cache most of the time. Your AI cost curve is an engineering choice, and most teams make it by accident.
The AI boom is funding a two-year asset with six-year money
Hyperscalers finance AI chips over six years but the hardware is obsolete in two or three. That gap quietly sets the compute price every AI product is planning around.
Someone is subsidizing your AI compute
The AI infrastructure boom is partly lending to itself. That changes the cost curve you're planning around, and most companies building on it haven't noticed.