Five tech giants are hiding $1.65tn in AI debt, using the trick that toppled Enron

Comments

• rumschlumpel@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Kann that Bubble pop real soon, pretty please? Even SD-Cards tripled in price since March 2025 …

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  • definitemaybe@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    ikr? My video card died last week. RIP my wallet.

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    • rumschlumpel@feddit.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      ouch

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• SocialistVibes01@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Capitalism working as intended

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  • DdCno1@beehaw.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Given your username and where it’s registered, you will not like the answer, but: Socialists were also notorious for cooking the books to hide their failures, even more so than dirty capitalist pigs. It’s one of the reasons why the system failed.

    This doesn’t make the AI bubble okay, of course. I’m only writing this, because your smug comment combined with your user name are particularly ironic.

    Another thing: Had LLMs like we have them now been available in the '70s and '80s, the likes of East Germany and the Soviet Union would have been all over them in a desperate bid to save their economic system, just like they tried to with computerized planning and automation back then, wasting ridiculous and economically ruinous amounts of resources on extremely inefficient chip production before they collapsed. In a way, current-day tech giants and the corporate world in general are repeating this mistake in a desperate bid to tasks part in the “next big thing” to get out of the stagnation they found themselves in.

    Call it history repeating itself or rhyming - either way, I’m noticing some patterns here.

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    • tracyspcy@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I’m struggling to get the point of your comment. Let me try to squeeze some ideas from your post:

      • socialists are even worse than capitalist;
      • extremely inefficient chip production collapsed Soviet Union economy;
      • current-day tech giants as desperate today in attempt to save “their economic system” as Soviet Union and East Germany were in '70s and '80s?
      • all of above mentioned “doesn’t make the AI bubble okay, of course” right?

      PS If you feel painful to read this, so did others who read your post.

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    • SocialistVibes01@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Aw, beehaw. As expected. Corruption is a cog in the machine. You pigs call it lobbying sometimes. You’re almost there but still unable to grasp that embezzlements are bound to happen in every market economy, planned or not that happens in capitalist systems, what those economies really were although severely restricted by NATO.

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    • deft@lemmy.wtf ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Most countries should be all over LLMs

      Whether people want to admit it or not. AI will be the thing that takes the next step in most areas of influence. It’s literally the next industrial or atomic revolution. Just because there is an AI bubble and the companies around it are doing all they can to bail out the water of a sinking ship doesn’t make the actual tech itself bad or stupid.

      That said all systems are corrupt. This whole capitalism vs socialism shit just exposes anyone who thinks that way as an idiot. It’s not red vs blue , it’s not an is or isn’t sort of thing.

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• melsaskca@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Those business people. Do they even know business? I think it’s just fraudulent of them to call themselves “business” people. Also, my kitchen sink tap is “tech”. Not everything “tech” has to be related to the computers or the “digitals”.

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  • Art3mis@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Youre forgetting that their kitchen tap is touch sensitive and “smart”

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• morrowind@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  why is this written using sarcastic capitalization Image

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  • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I’d have to guess it’s something weird with how they’re using web fonts or something. Looks fine on my end.

    Image

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  • TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Are you using a very specific browser? On vanilla thrashware it works just fine.

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• sem@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Huh, the thing i remember about Enron was how they colluded with power plant operators to cause blackouts and raise the price of electricity so they could cash out.

  Interesting that the debt thing was less memorable.

  The mechanics are simple. A company packages the debt for chips, servers, and power into a separate legal entity, often a joint venture, so the cost never flows through its own accounts.

  Take Meta’s Hyperion data centre in Louisiana. Meta and Blue Owl Capital both put equity into a separate structure that took on $27 billion in debt. Meta is the sole tenant, yet argues it does not have to record that debt, because it is not the one who must find replacement tenants.

  Oracle has $260 billion of future lease commitments that will eventually land on its books. Nvidia carries $119 billion in purchase obligations. Alphabet and Microsoft keep their vehicles off-book too.

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• BigMacHole@thelemmy.club ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  ILLEGAL? But these are CORPORATIONS! They CANT do anything Illegal!

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