[RE]

THEGUARDIAN.COM 2026-09-20

AI slowdown calls justified but collapse of bubble may be more immediate threat

Away from the risk that their product might obliterate human life, there are more old-fashioned reasons for tech bosses to be fearful – including the fundamental one of whether the economics of their businesses work.  The first worry is the sheer scale of debt issuance being used to fund the hectic pace of the datacentre rollout by the hyperscalers building them – Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Oracle – $132bn (£99bn) this year alone on one estimate.

A little more detail on the REAL risk posed by AI to the global financial system.  It's similar to the debt crisis of 2008 in some respects, but much larger because it features an equity component as well, and the debt isn't distributed amongst millions of individual debtors like the mortgage crisis.  In this case the debt is concentrated amongst the very rich and the stock purchases are counted as part of the capital structure of banks & hedge funds that bought the stock.  A large loss in the stock value would force many of these owners into bankruptcy or at least a liquidity lockup, soit wouldn't just be the Hyperscalers going bust, it would be the TBTF Banks who underwrote the stock on them as well.  IOW, not just one AIG to bailout, there could be a dozen or more of these systemically important banks in the deep doo doo.  With Goobermints already in a deep debt crisis of their own, it's not clear how they could do a bailout of this scale.  The longer the bubble goes, the worse it gets.  In terms of equity losses, it's far more than $132B, it's in the $TRILLIONS$

A real clusterfuck in the making.

RE

[RE]

SEEKINGALPHA.COM 2026-09-20

Big Tech’s $300B AI guarantees raise hidden risk for investors

Morgan Stanley estimates that seven major cloud and chip companies have accumulated more than $3.1 trillion in off-balance-sheet commitments and other forms of credit support.

Morgan's estimate is probably on the low end of the off balance sheet liabilities, but that obscures the fact that their on balance sheet liabilities are at least equal and probably double or triple that number.  So if the bottom falls out on the stock price, you're going to have a whole lotta hardware and a lot of expensive real estate going to auction.  Even if they could get 50 cents on the dollar for the hard assets (unlikely) your shortfall is probably $2T minimum.

On the upside, hobbyists and tinkerers will be swimming in cheap memory cards.

RE

[K-Dog]

The 'opencode' tool I am using is normally set up to use an LLM from a data-center.  I modified it to use a particular LLM that is modified to be a code jockey and nothing else.  When it is running it fills most of the video cards.  The Diner dreams of a 5090 but the price is now 70% over MSRP.

Because the tool is made to be used over the web and not use my video card, there is a counter in the interface that keeps track of how much you are spending to use the tool.  Ours is stuck at $0.00.  We don't even have an API key to log onto a data center.  We do not want one.

Chatbots can generate a lot of tokens.  Good I do not have the problem of paying for them.

* If you watch You-Tube videos on how to do anything AI the first half of the video wastes your time telling you how to sign up for an account.  You need a credit card they say, but don't worry you won't use enough tokens for what we are about to do to cost anything.  And they are telling the truth.  It appears to be a rite of passage, no corporate sponsorship without pushing the borg solution.

Their tutorials are examples.  Put software to real work in a loop and tokens matter.  But what can I say, I doubt it is possible to have a You-Tube channel without being a rabid ass kissing capitalist.


As far as cheap memory cards go, until there is an economic crash the shortage will continue.  Nvidia is all about making money, and if that makes everyone else poor.  Their attitude is too fucking bad.  I regret not getting a 5090 last November now it is too much.  But Nvidia will say too much for you, but not for somebody else.  They love the shortage.