Here's How the AI Crash Happens; The Atlantic

[edhopper]

27. I think this paragraph lays it out

The people who are paying attention to this cycle are getting anxious. On a scale from one to 10, the AI-bubble concern is: people posting memes of Christian Bale’s character from The Big Short, squinting in disbelief at his computer monitor. If tech stocks fall because of AI companies failing to deliver on their promises, the highly leveraged hedge funds that are invested in these companies could be forced into fire sales. This could create a vicious cycle, causing the financial damage to spread to pension funds, mutual funds, insurance companies, and everyday investors. As capital flees the market, non-tech stocks will also plummet: bad news for anyone who thought to play it safe and invest in, for instance, real estate. If the damage were to knock down private-equity firms (which are invested in these data centers) themselves—which manage trillions and trillions of dollars in assets and constitute what is basically a global shadow-banking system—that could produce another major crash.

For now, money is still pouring into the AI industry. But there’s also something circular about these investments. To wit: OpenAI has agreed to pay $300 billion to Oracle for new computing capacity, Oracle is paying Nvidia tens of billions of dollars for chips to install in one of OpenAI’s data centers, and Nvidia has agreed to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as it deploys Nvidia chips. Attempts to illustrate these circular investments have produced a series of byzantine charts that one software engineer referred to on X as “the technocapital hyperobject at the end of time.” The consensus seems to be that although this is legal, it likely cannot go on forever.